Accelerating Migrations to Cosmos DB NoSQL: White Paper

Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL is a general JSON database with a rich SQL-like interface, multi-region deployments (including multi-region writes), and strong availability guarantees. Cosmos DB has a usage-based billing model and has high elasticity - the database can dynamically scale or auto-scale from next-to-0 to ChatGPT.

One of the most common migration paths to Cosmos DB is from AWS DynamoDB. DynamoDB is a massively scalable key-value store used internally in AWS for many vital services. While both DynamoDB and Cosmos DB are serverless NoSQL databases, they have a lot of differences: data model, access patterns, multi-region deployment options, consistency guarantees.

For users wanting to explore Cosmos DB or migrate their production workloads from DynamoDB or other databases, Dsync is a perfect solution that makes the process seamless. You can migrate 100’s of GB’s of data in a few hours with one simple command. For smaller databases, you can use our Open Source single-binary version. For large migrations and production deployments you can use our scalable Enterprise Dsync (Dsynct).

In this white paper we review our approach for online database migrations to Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL, and we specifically examine the migration path from AWS DynamoDB. The paper covers technical details and the architecture of the migration solution with Dsync, as well as its practical advantages that accelerate and derisk migration projects.