In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud services, Azure Cosmos DB made a notable advancement a few years ago by introducing a dedicated free tier. Today, we’re thrilled to extend this remarkable feature to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore, empowering our users to unlock the full potential of this platform without any financial commitments.

So, if you are gearing up to create a new application, run quick proof of concepts (POC) or manage small-scale production workloads with Azure Cosmos DB then your journey has become smoother with our new Free Tier offering. The Free Tier comes with a default 32GB disk, and for a given subscription you can provision one free server in a region.

Key benefits

1. Zero Upfront Costs: Experience the free tier without any financial investment for a lifetime.
2. Effortless Onboarding: Just select “Free Tier” from the dropdown menu during cluster provisioning.
3. Generous Storage (32GB): Ensuring you never run out of disk, ideal for evaluating or managing small-scale production workloads seamlessly.
4. Seamless Upgrade Path: When you’re ready to scale, seamlessly transition to any of our available paid tiers without any hassle. Your data, connection string, and firewall rules will stay unchanged throughout the upgrade process.

Getting started with Free Tier

Follow the steps to create a new Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore cluster and select ‘Free Tier’ from the ‘Cluster Tier’ dropdown menu. You can create a free tier account from the Azure portal, PowerShell, CLI, or Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. Remember there is a limit of one free tier account per supported Azure region.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Q: How is this different from free tier offered for Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB (RU)?

A: Unlike other NoSQL APIs offered by Azure Cosmos DB, MongoDB vCore does not follow request units(RU) based billing model. MongoDB (vCore) allocates dedicated compute resources in the background, rendering the free tier limitations, such as the initial 1000 RU/s and 25 GB of storage applicable to other NoSQL APIs, irrelevant in this context.

Q: Is there a limit to the number of free tier servers I can create?

A: Yes, you can create only one free tier server per supported Azure region.

Q: Are there any differences in terms of the MongoDB commands supported on the free tier compared to the paid tier?

A: No, there are no differences at all.

Q: If I don’t have an Azure subscription, can I still provision a MongoDB vCore free tier account?

A: No, it is exclusive to customers with valid Azure subscriptions.

Q: If I use other Azure services such as Azure Functions, Azure Databricks, Azure Stream Analytics etc. to interact with data stored on Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore Free Tier account, will those services also be free?

A: No, they won’t be free. Each Azure service has its own pricing structure, and their usage will be billed separately. Please refer Azure pricing calculator for more details.

Q: Is it true, that this account will free for lifetime?

A: Yes, that’s correct. The Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore Free Tier server is free for the entire duration of your account’s existence.

Q: Is it possible to transition from a paid tier account to a free tier account?

A: No, it’s not supported at the moment.

 

Unlock the potential of Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore with our Free Tier and explore the world of application development without constraints. Dive in, innovate, start small and watch your ideas soar. Your journey begins here!

About Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed and serverless distributed database for modern app development, with SLA-backed speed and availability, automatic and instant scalability, and support for open-source PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Apache Cassandra. Try Azure Cosmos DB for free here. To stay in the loop on Azure Cosmos DB updates, follow us on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.