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I’ve had a lot of success with Azure Cosmos DB and have regularly tweeted about how “it does what it says on the tin” – and while the Graph support has been a bit of a bumpy .NET developer experience other than that it, so far (admittedly at limited volume in real world scenarios), looks good too. It’s certainly looking like a success for Microsoft though its had a massive marketing push over the last year.
However Microsoft seem to be continually undermining it with ridiculous pricing levels that put it out of reach of smaller more cost conscious customers that prevent it from being a truly end to end scalable database solution for the cloud which is disappointing given how it is usually pitched as the defacto database for Azure.
Until this weeks Build event pricing was governed by the amount of resource units (RUs) you applied to a collection (or Graph). Collections essentially being sets of documents that share a partition key.
There are two types of collection: fixed and unlimited. Fixed is:
- Un-partitioned (no partition key is specified).
- The minimum number of RUs you can allocate is 400.
- The maximum is 10000 RUs.
- Maximum storage of 10Gb.
Whereas unlimited is:
- Partitioned – you need to supply a partition key when you create the collection and structure your code to make use of it.
- Pricing starts at 1000RUs (down from its previous entry point of 2500RUs).
- There is no maximum limit although if you want to go beyond 100,000 you might need to call Azure Support.
- There is no maximum limit for storage.
To put those into financial context fixed pricing begins at around $23 per month per collection and unlimited at $58 per month per collection.
On its own that’s pretty reasonable but remember this is per collection so if you have multiple types of document that’s potentially multiple collections. I’ve heard two workarounds suggested for this. The first is to store multiple document types inside a single collection – the problem with this is that when you design a storage strategy for a solution often you know you are going to outgrow this kind of bodge so you’re essentially being forced to incur technical debt from day one (you’re just trading hosting costs for development cost). The second is to “take advantage of our free plans” and while its great to see free plans available its hard not to feel like you’ve just set a timer running on a small explosive and have sat on it, plus combined with other service usage those plans might not be sufficient: Cosmos is unlikely to be running on its own. (As an side – why is this such an issue? Different document types often require different partition keys and strategies based on both their content and the characteristics of the queries you want to run against them – its one of the most important considerations for the storage strategy with a database like Cosmos)
Now, with the announcement at Build, we’re able to provision RUs at the database level allowing collections in that database to share them. To me that sounded great – being able to provision, say, a 2500RU database and have it sit over 10 collections that I can later pull out and provision with their own RU allocations as my needs grow. Unfortunately the devil was in the detail on this one and visiting the Azure pricing page the minimum RU level for a database has been set at 50000. That’s approximately $3000 per month and as Howard van Rooijen noted on Twitter “feels like you’re renting the cluster”. I completely agree and its not the first time in the last few months I’ve felt that Azure seemingly has an internal inability to operate at a granular level and that that is limiting its service.
Maybe Microsoft feel ignoring the cost conscious segment of the market is ok but that’s running the risk of alienating up and coming startups or turning them to competing services – the cloud is an increasingly competitive market and Microsoft are still the underdog. And with the advent of .NET Core and its cross platform capabilities it’s getting easier than ever to run .NET code on other vendors – and sometimes even better than on Azure. For example Azure Functions have come on in leaps and bounds but are still beset by problems that are not an issue on AWS Lambda.
In fact in the same space Cosmos plays, AWS have DynamoDB as a document database and Neptune as a graph database. I’m no expert in either but they seem to have far more proportional pricing models than Cosmos and increasingly look worth investigating. And that’s dangerous to Microsoft – I’ve been using both .NET and Azure since they respectively launched and so am pretty much in their developer heartland – but the more I’m pushed away by decisions like this the more likely it is that I, and others, jump in a more wholesale manner. Its really not the message they want to be leaving us with at one of their premier events.
I guess its a case of watch this space. This pricing model is in preview and there’s track record for back tracking on RU limits but getting down from 50000 RUs to something affordable – that’s going to be a massive change.
I’d love to see it happen.
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