He's talking about building the underlying failover mechanism for CosmoDB. For a customer it's easy and automatic, but GCP and AWS and Azure have to build it first.

Surely you're referring to Microsoft's team's time to implement failover to the product offering, not time every customer spends on implementation???

FTA: "if _you_ are an engineer working on a small thing, say datacenter automatic failover component" (emphasis added). Pretty sure he's talking about EVERY customer spending months to turn on fail-over.

The previous poster is correct, I think you are mistaken. It should read like this:

"if you are an engineer at Microsoft working on a small azure component, say datacenter automatic failover component"

At least this is how I read it since the OP works at MS it appears.

But months?

To build a globally distributed database offering as complex as Cosmos DB with multiple SLA requirements? Can you build it faster?

I can't for the life of me think of a compelling reason why regional fallover is something most companies would want in a db. It sounds great, but the reality is: the last time Azure had a regional failure, it also took down other regions. AWS and Google also have similar horror stories. On paper, regions are geographically isolated, but the reality is that in all of these instances of failure there was some "super-region" that has some core global infra that every region relied on, and it went down (AWS and us-east-1, Azure and south central US).

You don't actually want single-provider multi-regional, what you want is multi-provider, like what Anthos is trying to do. But that's a harder sell to CIOs, and Azure checks a lot of boxes on paper despite being just horrible.

The other funny thing about Azure is how they champion the number of regions they have (54), but many of these regions only have one AZ (only 8 have more than one). So when they say that something is multi-region or does regional fallover, its like, "great, that's TABLE STAKES for getting HA on Azure". But with AWS, you have at least two AZs in every region, so its not as big of a deal. GCP is the same way, but there's some language in their docs even AWS poked fun at during Re:Invent last year where they say that AZs "often" have isolated power and networking. Not always, just often. So are they truly isolated?

This isn't about customers using the cloud. His perspective is as an engineer on the Azure team building these databases and other features for you to use.

He's "inventing" the cloud so that you don't have to reinvent, as you state.

Hi, I am from Azure Cosmos DB Engineering Team.

The article is referring to the implementation details of automatic failover mechanisms inside of Cosmos DB service.

For the customers, automatic failover is available as a turnkey capability. Customers do not need to spend any time to implement automatic failover.

Thanks.