Provision an Azure Cosmos DB

Lab Overview:

This hands-on lab provides an Azure administrator with an understanding of how to implement Microsoft Azure’s Cosmos DB. Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed database service. It allows users to scale throughput and storage across geographies elastically and enables data access through several APIs, such as SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Tables, or Gremlin. You will gain the exposure required to understand how an on-premise web app that has database dependencies can be migrated to a serverless application cloud environment. These skills are essential for someone pursuing a career path as an Azure administrator, architect, or engineer.

Understand the scenario

You are a system administrator for a company that is migrating its primary web app from their on-premise data center to Microsoft Azure’s cloud. You need to configure an Azure Cosmos database that will be used by the web app. First, you will create a Cosmos DB account, and then you will define and populate the database. Finally, you will test the database using a test page provided within the web app.

Create an Azure Cosmos DB account:

Implementing Cosmos DB for your Azure environment can be completed in just a few simple steps. In this section, you will provision an Azure Cosmos DB account, create a new database, and create and configure a DB collection with a fixed storage capacity. These steps ensure you have the right resources provisioned, to then populate with your data.

Populate a Cosmos DB collection:

For this task, you are provided some sample data consistent with the theme of the database you’ve created. The data is formatted as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), a standardized format of human-readable text. This format can be easily imported into your database. Once your data is imported, you will become familiar with navigating the Azure portal Cosmos DB blade and review the collection of data, ensuring that it is imported correctly.

Test the connection to the Cosmos DB database from the web app:

To enable your web application to connect to the database, you need to provide it with the URI of the database and one of the access keys. You will become familiar with locating this information within the Azure portal and then using it to test your web app’s access to the database. For this lesson, you are provided a web application with a test page that will confirm the correct configuration.

Lab Summary Conclusion:

Migrating serverless applications to the cloud is a common strategy for business organizations nowadays. Microsoft’s Azure platform allows you to migrate your apps and configure a Cosmos DB that can elastically and independently scale across geographies to meet your organization's demands and applications. In this hands-on lab, you will learn the basic steps to provision, configure, and test a Cosmos DB that integrates with a web application. These skills are essential for someone pursuing a career as an Azure administrator, architect, or engineer.

Other Challenges in this series

• Guided Challenge - Provision an Azure SQL Server database
• Advanced Challenge - Can you Provision Relational Databases for a Web App?