Announcing Cosmos DB and Blob (Hot/Cool) Storage

Lily Kim, General Manager, Azure Global

As we look to continue to expand and evolve the platform, we are excited to announce two new generally available services in Azure Government: Azure Cosmos DB and Blob Storage (Hot/Cool).  Yesterday Microsoft announced Azure Cosmos DB and today we are bringing it to you in Azure Government.  The update will be rolled out to all Azure Government users in the coming days.  This is part of our effort to accelerate innovation in our government cloud.

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB started as “Project Florence” in the late 2010 to address developer pain-points faced by large scale applications inside Microsoft, observing that the challenges of building globally distributed apps are not a problem unique to Microsoft. In 2015, we made the first generation of this technology available to Azure Developers in the form of Azure DocumentDB. Since that time, we’ve added new features and introduced significant new capabilities.  Azure Cosmos DB is the result.

Azure Cosmos DB is the next big leap in globally distributed, at scale, cloud databases. As a part of this release of Azure Cosmos DB, DocumentDB customers (with their data) are automatically Azure Cosmos DB customers. The transition is seamless and they now have access to the new breakthrough system and capabilities offered by Azure Cosmos DB:

  • Turnkey global distribution – Easily build globally-distributed applications without the hassle of complex, multiple-datacenter configurations. Designed as a globally distributed database system, Azure Cosmos DB automatically replicates all of your data to any number of regions of your choice, for fast, responsive access. Azure Cosmos DB supports transparent multi-homing and guarantees 99.99% high availability.
  • Limitless elastic scale around the globe – With Azure Cosmos DB, you only pay for the throughput and storage you need. Azure Cosmos DB allows you to independently and elastically scale storage and throughput at anytime, anywhere across the globe.
  • Multiple, well-defined consistency choices – Azure Cosmos DB offers five, well-defined, consistency levels-strong, bounded staleness, consistent-prefix, session, and eventual-for an intuitive programming model with low latency and high availability for your planet-scale app.
  • Guaranteed low latency at 99th percentile – Serve, read, and write requests from the nearest region while simultaneously distributing data across the globe. With its latch-free and write optimized database engine, Azure Cosmos DB guarantees less than 10-ms latencies on reads and less than 15-ms latencies on (indexed) writes at the 99th percentile.
  • Industry-leading, enterprise-grade SLAs – Rest assured your apps are running on a “battle-tested” database service, built on world-class infrastructure. Azure Cosmos DB gives you enterprise-grade security and compliance, and is the first and only service to offer industry-leading SLAs for 99.99% high availability, latency at the 99th percentile, guaranteed throughput, and consistency.

For more information on Azure Cosmos DB please see the documentation.

Blob Storage (Hot/Cool)

Blob storage accounts are specialized storage accounts for storing your unstructured data as blobs (objects) in Azure Storage.  With Blob Storage accounts, you can choose between hot and cool storage tiers to store your less frequently accessed (cool) data at a lower storage cost, and store more frequently accessed (hot) data at a lower access cost.

Customers can take advantage of the cost benefits of the cool storage tier for storing backup data, media content, scientific data, active archival data-and in general, any data that is less frequently accessed. For details on how to start using this feature, please see the getting-started documentation.

We welcome your comments and suggestions to help us continually improve your Azure Government experience. To stay up to date on all things Azure Government, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and to receive emails, click “Subscribe by Email” on the Azure Government Blog. To experience the power of Azure Government for your organization, sign up for an Azure Government Trial.

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