Cosmos DB

Cosmos DB is a non-relational, NoSQL database service that Microsoft hosts. It is globally distributed and provides horizontally scalable table storage, with built-in redundancy that provides a 99.99% SLA for reads and writes.

This availability capability allows data to be replicated to many Azure regions concurrently. It also provides low latency and performance so that data can be accessed anywhere in the world and scaled seamlessly at the click of a button. Security is also built in and provides row-level authorization and data encryption in transit and at rest.

The following are some of the benefits and capabilities of Cosmos DB:

• It’s mission-critical ready, with guaranteed speed at any scale.
• It provides simplified application development.
• It provides use cases for gaming, mobile applications, social applications, retail, marketing, and IoT.
• It can be used in conjunction with serverless solutions such as Azure Functions.
• It is fully managed and cost-effective.
• It can be used to store unstructured and semi-structured data, such as XML and JSON files.
• It is available through the Standard/Autoscale Provisioned Throughput and Serverless Database Operations pricing models, as well as the Single-Region Write (Single-Master) and Multiple-Region Write (Multi-Master) region models.

The following APIs are supported for interacting with Cosmos DB:

• SQL API
• MongoDB API
• Gremlin (Graph) API
• Table API
• Cassandra API

This section looked at Cosmos DB. In the next section, we will look at some hands-on exercises that will reinforce the knowledge you’ve learned throughout this chapter and increase your skills.

Hands-on exercises

To support your learning with some practical skills, we will learn how to create some of the resources that we looked at in this chapter.

We will look at the following exercises:

• Exercise 1 – creating a VNet
• Exercise 2 – creating a storage account
• Exercise 3 – creating a VM
• Exercise 4 – creating an Azure container instance
• Exercise 5 – creating an Azure web app

Getting started

To get started with these hands-on exercises, you must create a free Azure account at https://azure.microsoft.com/free.

This free Azure account provides the following:

• 12 months of free services
• $200 credit to explore Azure for 30 days
• 25+ services that are always free

Let’s move on to the first exercise.