News

Microsoft's Cosmos Database for AI Sees Impressive Growth

• By Kurt Mackie
• 04/30/2018

"I've been around databases for a long time. I've never seen a product that's gotten to this kind of scale this quickly," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on an investor call in late April about Azure Cosmos DB, the company's new multi-model database aimed at AI projects. Microsoft the database in May 2017. "In less than a year, Azure Cosmos DB, the first globally distributed [and] multi-model database, exceeded $100 million in annualized revenue," Nadella commented. This means that the database is pulling in apx. $8.3 million per month. Cosmos DB includes support for multiple data models, including document, graph, key-value, table and column-family, and has APIs for SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin and Table. It replaces Microsoft's previous NoSQL offering DocumentDB, and is competitive against Amazon Web Services (AWS) DynamoDB and Google Spanner. During the investor call, Nadella positioned Azure Cosmos DB as a potential cornerstone of future data projects on Azure, especially as artificial intelligence efforts drive demand for more and more data. "This AI era is mostly first a data era. And that's where I think the opportunity lies," Nadella said. "Cosmos DB happens to be one of the best database products to be able to capture the signals that you want around your customers from a variety of different sources." Microsoft stands behind Azure Cosmos DB with several guarantees, including a four-nines uptime service-level agreement, end-to-end latency times in the low millisecond range and zero-data loss in the case of regional failures.