Serverless
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Category: Throughput & Scaling
Summary: Consumption-based billing for actual RUs used; suits intermittent/unpredictable traffic.
Overview
Serverless is a consumption-based capacity mode in Azure Cosmos DB where you are billed only for the RUs actually consumed by your operations, with no need to provision or manage throughput ahead of time. It is well suited for workloads with intermittent, unpredictable, or low traffic, such as dev/test environments or infrequently used APIs.
max 50GB storage and 20,000 RUs/sec and it can be increased by contacting support and it is not available for multi-region accounts.
az cosmosdb create --resource-group "" --name "" --kind GlobalDocumentDB --capabilities EnableServerless
More Info & Links
DP-420 Style Practice Questions
Q1. What is the billing model for Azure Cosmos DB serverless capacity mode?
- A. Pay only for the RUs actually consumed, with no pre-provisioned throughput
- B. A flat monthly fee regardless of usage
- C. Billing based on the number of containers only
- D. Billing based on the number of regions only
Q2. Which scenario is a good fit for serverless capacity mode?
- A. An application with intermittent, unpredictable traffic
- B. A large-scale production workload with constant, predictable high throughput
- C. A workload requiring multi-region writes
- D. A workload requiring more than the serverless storage/throughput limits
Answer Key
Answers are listed at the very end so you can attempt the questions first.
- Q1 (Serverless): A. Pay only for the RUs actually consumed, with no pre-provisioned throughput — Serverless bills based on actual RU consumption rather than a reserved throughput amount.
- Q2 (Serverless): A. An application with intermittent, unpredictable traffic — Serverless suits variable or infrequent workloads where paying only for consumption is more cost-effective.
DP-420: Designing and Implementing Cloud-Native Applications Using Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB — term detail page
