Introduction
Microsoft just introduced a free tier Cosmos DB account starting March 6. Officials said via the Free Tier, users get the first 400 request units (RUs)/throughput and 5 GB of storage in their accounts for free each month for the lifetime of the account. (Users also can create up to 25 containers in a shared throughput database sharing the free 400RUs.) Users can have up to one Free Tier account per Azure subscription.
We can see all the steps for creating a free tier Cosmos DB account with multi write regions. Please note that, free tier is valid for one region only. If you want to add multiple regions, you must pay additional charges. Please refer to below article from Microsoft for more details.
You must require an Azure subscription. Login to Azure portal first.
Choose “Create a resource” option
We can choose a valid resource group and account name. Currently Cosmos DB support five different types of API in free tier. We can choose default SQL DB API. Most importantly, choose Apply Free Tier Discount.
We can choose the nearest geo location. By default, account type is non production mode. I have kept it as Non-Production mode. I have also not enabled multi region writes. We can enable it later. It will take 10 – 15 minutes for the entire deployment of Cosmos DB account.
After some time, you will get a deployment complete message.
We can click “Replicate data globally” menu
You can see that West US location is selected by default. We can choose two more regions “East US” and “West India”
We can enable multi-region writes. Our three regions will be ready for read and write.
We can click the Save button to save the settings. It will take some time to finish the configuration changes.
Conclusion
In this post, we have seen how to create a Cosmos DB SQL API in free tier account and setup multi-region write.