Request Units (RUs)

Azure Cosmos DB is costed based on request units (RUs). The cost to do a point read of a single, 1KB item is 1RU. All database operations are assigned an RU cost.

A request unit is a a representation of the resources consumed by executing an operation - CPU time, IOPS, and memory usage.

There are two ways that you can be charged for RUs in Azure Cosmos DB:

• Provisioned
  You provision throughput in 100s of RUs per second increments. This can be scaled either manually or programmatically.
• Serverless
  You don't provision throughput, you are charged for what you use at the end of the billing period.