Distributed systems rarely struggle because of storage engines. They struggle because of coordination.
We were operating a high-throughput microservice on Kubernetes backed by Azure Cosmos DB. The service required durability, global availability, and predictable read behavior under horizontal scaling. Cosmos DB was configured with SESSION consistency because it offers a practical balance between correctness and performance. It guarantees read-your-own-writes without incurring the latency and throughput penalties associated with strong consistency.