Microsoft announces several new updates for Azure Cosmos DB

At Build 2021, Microsoft today announced several new updates for Azure Cosmos DB, a cloud database service built from the ground up to power planet-scale cloud services and data-intensive applications.

Last year, Microsoft announced Azure Cosmos DB serverless, a more cost-effective way to use Azure Cosmos DB. It allowed developers to handle “bursty” workloads in a cost-effective way. Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Cosmos DB serverless for all APIs (Core, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin and Table). Microsoft also announced the preview release of Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator which will allow Linux developers to easily develop apps based on Cosmos DB on Linux PCs. You can read the list of new updates for Azure Cosmos DB below.

• With the introduction of the partial document update for Azure Cosmos DB, developers can modify specific fields or properties within a document without requiring a full document read and replace. This gives developers more flexibility to update only certain portions. Partial document update is available for Core (SQL) API and via .NET SDK, Java SDK and stored procedures. Developers can sign up for the partial document update preview.
• Azure Cosmos DB serverless is now generally available for all APIs (Core, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin and Table). Developers can now optimize costs and more easily run apps with spiky traffic patterns on Azure Cosmos DB. Serverless is a cost-effective pricing model that charges only for the resources consumed by database operations. It is ideally suited for apps with moderate performance requirements and frequent periods with little to no traffic.
• Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator is now in preview. With the introduction of the Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator, Linux developers can now build, test and learn on Azure Cosmos DB, free and locally on their Linux and macOS machines. The Linux emulator is a free local download of Azure Cosmos DB and does not require an Azure subscription.
• Azure Cosmos DB expanded free tier is now generally available. Developers now have more flexibility to build, test and learn in the cloud with the expansion of free tier, which provides 1,000 request units (RU/s) provisioned throughput and free 25GB storage monthly for the lifetime of one Azure Cosmos DB account per Azure subscription.
• Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache is now in preview. Customers can optimize costs for read-heavy workloads by setting up an integrated cache in their Azure Cosmos DB account. The cache is billed hourly for fixed, dedicated compute resources, and it reduces the number of requests hitting the operational database, resulting in lower costs.
• Always Encrypted for Azure Cosmos DB is now in preview. Customers can encrypt sensitive data inside their client app before it gets stored in their database with Always Encrypted for Azure Cosmos DB. This ensures that confidential parts of datasets are only available to appropriate audiences. It also enables customers who must comply with regulatory requirements to use Azure Cosmos DB to securely store their data in the cloud.

Source: Microsoft