It is PaaS , you are locked down (just like a lot of other solutions.) The biggest problem we had with other no-SQL databases (we were high on interop and started with HBase / Phoenix ) is that over time the storage costs and operational costs get out of hand especially if we do not have a good data archival part (sometimes limited by legality as well). As for your frustrating experience , the mileage varies. We were happy with it , so no comments on that one. For cosmos , we used it for extremely "hot"/"warm" data that was aggregated and made available readily for applications to use. We had reserved instances (big on Azure) , so we keep things in check that way.