Microsoft recently announced the preview of Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore, a fully-managed MongoDB-compatible database service that provides developers with a familiar architecture for building modern applications with native Azure integrations and a low total cost of ownership.
With the additional Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore, developers can now choose between two architectures for running their data workloads on Azure Cosmos DB - the original throughput Request Unit (RU) and the newly designed vCore architecture.
According to the Microsoft documentation, the RU-based option works well for building new cloud-native MongoDB apps or refactoring existing apps. In contrast, the vCore-based option is better suited for lifting and shifting existing MongoDB apps to run as-is on a fully supported managed service. In addition, the RU-based option offers up to 99.999% availability with multi-region deployments and limitless horizontal scalability, while the vCore-based option offers competitive SLA (once generally available) and high-capacity vertical and horizontal scaling with vCore-based cluster tier options.
Furthermore, the RU-based option is better suited for workloads with more point reads, fewer long-running queries, and complex aggregation pipeline operations. On the other hand, the vCore-based option can handle workloads with any operation types, including long-running queries, complex aggregation pipelines, distributed transactions, joins, and so on.
Developers can create an Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore cluster that includes all the MongoDB resources (databases, collections, and documents) and a unique endpoint for various tools and SDKs for connectivity by using the Azure portal or bicep template. Furthermore, some everyday use cases can be storing and querying user-generated content (UGC) for web, mobile, and social media applications, such as chat sessions, tweets, blog posts, ratings, and comments.
Nikisha Reyes-Grange, director of product marketing, Azure Data, told InfoQ:
Empowering MongoDB developers and removing the friction they encounter in the development process of intelligent applications has never been more important. Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore offers integrations with many Azure services, a familiar vCore architecture, predictable pricing, and enhanced querying to support apps such as chatbots.
Lastly, there are variable fees for RUs and consumed storage with the RU-based option, while with the vCore-based option, customers will pay for the number of vCores provisioned. More details on pricing and availability are available on the pricing page.