Question

A financial services team is configuring an Azure Cosmos DB account that must be deployed across three Azure regions (East US, West Europe, and Southeast Asia). Their compliance team demands that every read return the most recent committed write with a linearizable guarantee. During design, an architect proposes enabling multi-region writes so that clients in each region write to their nearest region for lower write latency. What should you advise the team?

Accepted Answer

Strong consistency cannot be combined with multi-region writes; they must choose either strong consistency with a single write region or a weaker consistency level to enable multi-region writes.

Answer

Enable multi-region writes and select strong consistency, since strong consistency is supported across all write regions when automatic failover is enabled.

Answer

Enable multi-region writes with bounded staleness, which provides the same linearizable guarantee as strong consistency across regions.

Answer

Enable multi-region writes with session consistency, which guarantees globally that all readers see the most recent committed write.