{"id":12246,"date":"2026-06-02T12:15:36","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T19:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/?p=12246"},"modified":"2026-06-02T08:56:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T15:56:19","slug":"announcing-the-general-availability-of-per-partition-automatic-failover-for-azure-cosmos-db-nosql","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/announcing-the-general-availability-of-per-partition-automatic-failover-for-azure-cosmos-db-nosql\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing the General Availability of Per Partition Automatic Failover for Azure Cosmos DB NoSQL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, we are excited to announce the General Availability of Per Partition Automatic Failover (PPAF) for Azure Cosmos DB NoSQL API. PPAF is a significant advancement in how Azure Cosmos DB delivers availability and resilience for mission-critical workloads running on single-write-region accounts.<\/p>\n

If you rely on Azure Cosmos DB to be always on for your mission-critical applications \u2014 PPAF is built for you.<\/p>\n

With PPAF, Azure Cosmos DB can automatically recover affected partitions by failing\u00a0over writes\u00a0to a secondary region within 3 minutes at P99, without requiring application changes.<\/p>\n

A smarter, more granular failover<\/h3>\n

Azure Cosmos DB already supports active-active deployments through multi-region writes. With PPAF, you can now achieve an active-active architecture on a single-write-region account by allowing individual partitions to fail over to other regions automatically, while preserving your configured consistency level.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, if your account’s write region experienced an outage, Azure Cosmos DB had to fail over the entire account to a secondary region, which is complex and requires time. PPAF makes geo-failover automatic and far more agile by performing failovers at the partition level. If a partition-set in the preferred write region has an outage, PPAF automatically promotes another region as the new write region for that partition-set. Unaffected partitions continue writing to the preferred region without interruption. When the original write region recovers, the system detects the recovery,\u00a0initiates\u00a0a failback to the preferred region, and automatically reconciles any data changes during the process.<\/p>\n

\"Active-Active<\/a>
Active-Active deployments using multi-writer and PPAF.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Use cases PPAF enables<\/h3>\n

Mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate write downtime.<\/strong> Payments, order management, real-time gaming, ride-hailing, and IoT ingestion workloads where every minute of write unavailability has a direct business impact. With sub-three-minute RTO at P99, regional incidents become a non-event for most of your users.<\/p>\n

Single-write-region workloads that need multi-region resiliency.<\/strong> Customers who previously considered multi-write regions purely for availability \u2014 but did not want to design and operate conflict resolution logic \u2014 can now achieve a comparable resiliency profile without that complexity.<\/p>\n

Workloads with strict consistency requirements.<\/strong> Financial systems, ledgers, and inventory platforms running on Strong consistency maintain RPO = 0 through a PPAF failover. Your consistency contract is honored end-to-end.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Per<\/a><\/p>\n

Near-instant recovery during outages<\/h3>\n

Partition failover is granular and designed to complete within 3 minutes at P99,\u00a0representing\u00a0a significant improvement over traditional account-level failover.<\/p>\n

In practice, Azure Cosmos DB accounts with PPAF enabled have\u00a0maintained\u00a0write availability during partial regional disruptions, with affected partitions redirecting writes to secondary regions within minutes.<\/p>\n

Transparent to your application<\/h3>\n

Your application does not need\u00a0additional\u00a0logic to take advantage of PPAF. You continue writing to your Azure Cosmos DB account endpoint as usual. Behind the scenes, the Azure Cosmos DB SDKs handle redirection when a partition failover occurs, and your application automatically retries writes to the new write region for that partition. No code changes are\u00a0required\u00a0beyond upgrading to a supported SDK version and enabling the feature on your account.<\/p>\n