Optimize Costs and Performance in Azure Cosmos DB: Best Practices for Developers

Optimizing Azure Cosmos DB involves using strategies and best practices to maintain and improve performance and availability while reducing overall spending on services.

In this blog, we’ll look at actionable strategies and tools to reduce Azure Cosmos DB costs without sacrificing cost. speed, scalabilityor trustworthy Your database. Whether you manage large scale application or development on budgetThese insights will help you get the most out of Azure Cosmos DB.

The main subtopics we will cover are:

1. pricing model
2. free development
3. optimization plan

1. Pricing model

Azure Cosmos DB charges for three types of usage: calculate, saveand bandwidth. What does this mean? Let’s break it down.

Your Azure Cosmos DB bill is based on: Request Unit (RU) Measured in units per second (RU/s). A request unit is a currency for throughput. This represents the cost of database operations that can be read, written, or queried. These operations consume a certain number of Request Units (RUs) depending on their complexity and size.

Azure Cosmos DB charges for storage used, rounded up to the next gigabyte (GB) per container, collection, table, or graph, per region.

Data transfer between Azure Cosmos DB and other Azure services or the Internet incurs additional costs. The exact price depends on the amount of data transferred.

Azure Cosmos DB account type

You will be charged based on the type of account you have. Your Azure Cosmos DB account can be one of the following: Provisioned Throughput or Serverless account.

Provisioned throughput.

Think of provisioned throughput as a “rate limit” for your Azure Cosmos DB databases and containers. Determines how many requests (or operations) a database or container can process per second. Like highways with different speed limits, they allocate specific throughput to databases or containers.

You can scale up or down depending on your workload. However, there is a minimum throughput requirement to ensure SLA. You are charged for provisioned throughput even if you are not running the workload. This is because the model dedicates resources to a container or database.

What is the difference between an Azure Cosmos DB database and an Azure Cosmos DB container?

An Azure Cosmos DB database is a storage area where you can organize a set of containers. You can create multiple containers to hold different types of data.

Azure Cosmos DB containers are individual storage compartments within a database. It helps you organize your data effectively. The benefit is that you can set different throughputs for each depending on your workload.

Example/picture

Imagine you are developing an e-commerce application. The database name is: Online store. The containers included here are:

• product – To store product details

• customer – To store customer information

• order – To save an order location

Database-level and container-level throughput in Azure Cosmos DB.

Setting throughput at the database level applies to all containers within that database. You can choose from two options for provisioned throughput:

• Standard (manual) throughput: This is AFFixed rate limits for specific containers.
• Autoscale throughput: Speed ​​limits automatically adjust based on demand.

Throughput is distributed evenly across all partitions. If a container receives more requests than it is allocated, it can experience slowdowns.

The throughput of the container.

The throughput provisioned for a container is evenly distributed across physical partitions while assuming logical partitions of the container. Sometimes a logical partition consumes more throughput than is allocated to the primary physical partition. In such cases, the speed of work is limited. This requires re-provisioning the throughput of the entire container. Learn more about partitioning and horizontal scaling in Azure Cosmos DB.
The image shows how a physical partition hosts one or more logical partitions of a container.

The throughput of the database.

As previously explained, when you provision throughput for a database, the throughput is shared across all containers, unless you specify that some containers should use it.

When configuring throughput for a database, we recommend that you configure throughput across all containers rather than just some.

The image below shows how a physical partition can host one or more logical partitions belonging to different containers within the database.

Learn more about provisioned throughput in Azure Cosmos DB.

Serverless Account

Azure Cosmos DB’s serverless account type is designed for scenarios where you want to pay only for the resources you use. With the serverless option, you are charged based on the request units (RU) used for database operations and the storage used for your data.

Serverless Account Use Cases

1. A service is being developed or tested.
2. When there is an unexpected traffic jam
3. When integrating with serverless computing services such as Azure Functions.

Learn more about Azure Cosmos DB serverless account types.

2. Free development

second way Optimize your services on Azure Cosmos. DB is free development. There are two ways to develop for free. free tier or Use an emulator.

free tier

The Azure Cosmos DB free tier makes it easy to launch, develop, and test your applications, and even run small production workloads for free.

By activating the free tier on your Azure Cosmos DB account, you get the following benefits:

• First 1000 RU/s (Requests Units per second): The first 1000 RU/s are free.

• 25GB Storage: You also get 25GB storage for free.

If you exceed these limits, any additional throughput or storage used will be billed at regular prices.

The free tier is available for all API accounts with provisioned throughput, autoscaling throughput, and single or multiple write regions.

An illustration is provided in the previous blog, Exploring the features of Azure Cosmos DB for Mongo.

There are no costs with the free tier, but there is no option for high availability.

memo This free tier is not available for serverless accounts.

You can have up to one free tier Azure Cosmos DB account per Azure subscription. If you don’t see the option to apply a free tier discount, another account on the same subscription already has the free tier enabled.

Learn more about the Azure Cosmos DB lifetime free tier.

Use emulator

The Azure Cosmos DB Emulator is a powerful tool that provides a local environment for emulating the Azure Cosmos DB service. Mainly used for development and testing. The emulator allows you to develop without an Azure subscription.

The emulator’s Data Explorer window is supported only on API for NoSQL and API for MongoDB. Understand the differences between emulators and cloud services

Also check out our blog that guides you through local development using the Azure Cosmos DB emulator without C.

3. Optimization plan

Estimate costs before creating resources:

use Azure Cosmos DB capacity calculator Estimate workload costs before creating resources. The tool allows you to enter details such as number of regions, stored data, and expected workload.

Provides estimates of storage costs and provisioned throughput based on workload parameters.

This image shows how to use the capacity calculator. Visit our documentation on estimating RU/s using Azure Cosmos DB Capacity Planner to learn how.

Understand the overall billing model

Azure Cosmos DB runs on Azure infrastructure, and deploying new resources incurs costs. Azure Cosmos DB costs are just a portion of your monthly Azure bill, which includes all Azure services and resources used in your subscription, including third-party services.

Understand the overall billing model

Cost Monitoring

Using resources in Azure Cosmos DB incurs costs. Regularly monitor your usage and spending to stay within your budget.

You can view this in the Azure portal.

Step 1: Sign in to the Azure portal and go to Resources.

Step 2: Go to Overview section

Step 3: Clicking Monitoring at the bottom will display a forecast chart, allowing you to estimate usage at 1-hour, 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day intervals. You can see the estimates in the chart.

Create a Budget

To manage your costs effectively, set budgets in Azure Cost Management. Create alerts to alert you to spending anomalies and risks of overspending.

Here is an image showing how to achieve this:

Step 1: On your resource, expand Monitoring, select Alerts, and click Add Rule.

Step 2: When I select a signal, I will select the CPU credits consumed.

Step 3: Set a threshold to trigger an action

Step 4: Select an action from the Section tab. Let’s select ‘Use Quick Actions’, which is a feature in preview. You will receive a warning email from me. Specify a group name and display name.

Step 5: On the Details tab, add a name to the alert, then review and create the alert.

conclusion.

We’ve covered several ways you can optimize your resources in Azure Cosmos DB. Best practices help you optimize costs while ensuring your services perform as expected. For more details, please visit the link shared below.

Learn more

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Azure Cosmos DB

Best practices for scaling provisioned throughput (RU/sec)

Provisioned throughput in Azure Cosmos DB

Learn more about how to plan and manage your Azure Cosmos DB costs.

Optimize request costs in Azure Cosmos DB

Optimize storage costs in Azure Cosmos DB

Multi-region cost optimization in Azure Cosmos DB

Optimize development and testing costs in Azure Cosmos DB