Is Azure Cosmos DB Really Expensive?

SECOND UPDATE: As of August 2021, this post is really old now. Please don’t even read it!

UPDATE: This post is almost two years old. Some of the things I mentioned in this post might no longer be true. Cloud is very dynamic and things keep changing. So, please do visit Azure’s official documentation to understand the current state.

When you mention Azure Cosmos DB in any architecture/solutioning discussion, a likely question you get is “Isn’t Azure Cosmos DB expensive?”. Like any other thing in this world, the right but not so useful answer is that it depends. First of all, let us understand how Cosmos DB is priced. Cosmos DB is not priced based on the usage. Of course, Cosmos DB is more than a simple NoSQL database but like other NoSQL databases, the price is based on what you reserve. So, the analogy is renting a car rather than hailing a cab – you pay regardless of you used the rented car or not. So, what you reserve with Cosmos is the capacity – what Microsoft calls Request Units (RU) per second. You pay for the RU as well as the space (GB).

ASP.NET Core 2.0 Apps on Kubernetes in Google Cloud Platform (Google Kubernetes Engine)

The official instructions for deploying ASP.NET Core app on GKE is available here. So, why this post? If you are like me, you will want to do all the development in Windows using Visual Studio and want to finally deploy the app in the K8s cluster. So, this post shows doing most of the work through Windows command prompt. Of course, some of the manual steps shown here will be part of the CI/CD process in a real project.

CancellationToken with Task.Run and Wait

Cancelling tasks in .NET means using CancellationToken but then how the token is used really matters.