From Music City Code 2017 - An overview of Microsoft's managed NoSQL service in Azure

1. Azure Cosmos DB
The Great NoSQL Balancing
Act in the Microsoft Cloud
{
“speaker”: “Josh Lane”,
“title”: “Azure Content Lead”,
“company”: “cloudacademy.com”,
“twitter”: “@jplane”
}

2. All
Technology
Choice Is
Compromise

3. Oh, what
tangled webs
we weave…
Scale Up
Scale Out
Stored Procedures
Stored Procedures
Caching

4. Is Your Database An
Unquestioned Assumption?

5. How About This Instead?
Acknowledge
Choice is good… but
all choices
represent some
compromise
Choose!
Make a deliberate
choice
Goals
Meet requirements,
but also minimize
compromises

6. Purpose-built to solve real-world challenges of
data at scale
2010 – “Project Florence”
Elastic, global scale of throughput and storage
Predictable, low-latency reads and writes
Resource-governed architecture
Highly available and SLA-backed
Minimize/eliminate infrastructure burdens
Developer-friendly… multiple data models, APIs,
consistency options
Azure Cosmos DB

7. Guitar solo

8. Low-latency
Geo-scale
Familiar and approachable
Flexible and evolving
Cost-efficient
The Great Balancing Act

10. Document-based API

11. MongoDB compatibility

12. Azure Table Storage compatibility

13. Graph-based API

14. Choose-Your-Own Data Consistency Model

15. Availability
Single-click replication into any/all of 38+ datacenters
Failover
Automated and prioritized
Manual (for DR testing, “follow the clock”, etc.)
Multiple replicas within each configured region
Logical or physical API endpoints
Logical – transparent multi-homing
Physical – prioritized control over connectivity
Automated backups

16. Perf and Scale
Low latency reads (10 ms) and writes
(15 ms)
SLA-backed
Topology-agnostic
Provisioned, reserved throughput
model
Request Units per second (or
minute)
You can change this as needed!
Transparent partitioning
Single write replica, multi read
replicas

17. Drum solo

18. Areas for Improvement
Pricing model
“Something something great power something
great responsibility…”
Migration quirks
Triggers are opt-in
SQL dialect is a subset
API support must be declared up-front
Partitions are “transparent”, not transparent
Change feed fidelity
Portal tooling is… v1 

19. Designed for Happiness
ACID transactions (within a partition)
Automated and configurable indexing
Change feed
Geospatial data types
Local emulator
JavaScript sprocs, triggers, UDFs
Default encryption at rest + in transit
Configurable firewall
Configurable TTL
Azure Function binding
ODBC driver
LINQ (.NET)

20. Baseless
Speculation on
the Future
• More and richer query APIs
• More and better Azure ecosystem integration
• Architectural building blocks
• CQRS
• Event sourcing
• Stateful services
• More runtime integration
• .NET Core
• Azure Functions runtime
• Pricing innovation
• Spot market
• Secondary market
• ML-based resource governance
• Convergence with SQL Database

21. Thanks!
josh.lane@cloudacademy.com
@jplane