Earlier this month, nuu:bit, a digital content and revenue acceleration company, announced its successful integration of its own CDN Edge Compute Platform with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. The service combines CDN Edge Compute with a multi-model, flexible big data store and a content delivery and acceleration service. This will allow site and app publishers to improve performance, increase site acceleration, and closely customize the experience they are able to provide users.
Database backends are conventionally located in a cloud center remote from the end user. Site acceleration or similar services can reduce the delay by proxying the connection back to the origin, but the result is often less than first-rate. The new service from nuu:bit decentralizes the backend by using the distributed Azure Cosmos DB, and allows computations to be made near the edge device. Thus, it puts the data that the logic depends on close by and so improves end user experience.
“Choosing to integrate with Azure Cosmos DB was an easy choice, we already extensively utilize Azure to host the nuu:bit platform, but what made Azure Cosmos DB so appealing was the range of use cases it can accommodate and guaranteed low latency”, said Sam Farraj, nuu:bit CEO. “This new nuu:bit service will not only enhance online experiences, it will make it easier for publishers to manage the experience their users have online.”
The integration brings together site performance with Big Data. It gives publishers a range of accessible tools to manage users, organize sub-accounts, arrange infrastructure and push code.
Azure Cosmos DB was essentially designed to support horizontal scale and global distribution via Microsoft’s international datacenters. According to Rimma Nehme, Microsoft Group Product Manager, 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years alone. It is increasingly clear that traditional “Earthly” databases are not suitable for the rapid growth that has occurred and is expected to continue.
Azure Cosmos DB began as Project Florence (Florence because of the way in which the predicted explosion in data parallels the Italian city’s role at the center of the European Renaissance) in 2010. Essentially, the Cosmos DB team decided they needed to build a globally distributed database for the cloud in order to best serve the rapidly expanding needs of existing and future Microsoft customers and keep computation closer to data.
Azure Cosmos DB is now globally distributed database system that elastically scales and replicates a company’s data wherever its users are, operating through turnkey global distribution. Users only pay for the throughput and storage they need at any given time. Azure Cosmos DB provides native support for NoSQL choices, supports transparent multi-homing and assures 99.999% high availability and latency at the 99th percentile, along with guaranteed throughput and consistency.
The global database works with unpredictable and different IoT workloads by instantly scaling to meet demand. It also supports retail and e-commerce sites, which deal with a varying traffic load and rapidly changing inventory. Similarly, Azure Cosmos DB supports the delivery of low-latency multi-player experiences worldwide. Current customers include Citrix, Toyota, ASOS and LG CNS.
Shawn Nandi, Senior Director, Cloud App Development and Data and AI Product Marketing for Microsoft Corp. said of the new service with nuu:bit, “Enabling publishers and developers to deliver engaging online experiences to their global customers is a priority for us. nuu:bit has developed an innovative service that leverages Microsoft Azure services like Azure Cosmos DB to make it easier to deliver these enhanced experiences.”