As a developer, you are constantly asked if your service can talk to a new product. There is an emphasis on moving from the walled garden architecture of old to open, modular, easy-to-integrate services. Even software companies are struggling to catch up with this new demand, with many products still shipping as closed systems, without basic API layers.
So far, Cosmos DB has been mentioned several times in this book, but what is it? It's Microsoft's flagship cloud database. It's a fully elastic, dynamically resourced database which is schema agnostic. It has multiple APIs available. It has a native SQL API, which supports JSON documents, a MongoDB API, a Cassanda API, a Graph API and a Key-Value pair API. It can be tuned to maximum performance/parallelism and lower consistency, or back to the more traditional Atomicity, Consistency...