Microsoft Ignite 2025 kicked off with a wave of announcements for Azure Cosmos DB and Azure DocumentDB, setting the tone for a week of innovation in cloud databases and AI. Here’s your one-stop summary of everything unveiled—and what to watch for in the sessions ahead.

Major Azure Cosmos DB announcements from Ignite 2025

Azure DocumentDB now Generally Available

Azure DocumentDB is now generally available, bringing a new level of openness, flexibility, and cost efficiency to MongoDB workloads. Built on the open-source DocumentDB engine – now governed by the Linux Foundation – Azure DocumentDB delivers MongoDB compatibility with the freedom to build anywhere and run on Azure with hybrid and multicloud flexibility.

Formerly known as the vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB, the service has been renamed to reflect its open foundation and commitment to community-driven evolution. With predictable pricing, independent scaling of compute and storage, and seamless migration tools, enterprises can standardize their NoSQL workloads easily with Azure DocumentDB.

Customers can provision clusters, migrate existing MongoDB workloads with zero downtime, and scale performance and storage independently – all from Azure portal, without hidden costs or operational complexity.

Additional Azure DocumentDB updates

Bigger, faster workloads with high-performance storage in Azure DocumentDB

We also announced support for high-performance storage in Azure DocumentDB—enabling you to run larger, more demanding workloads on fewer nodes. Clusters now scale up to 64 TiB, 80,000 IOPS, and 1,200 MB/s throughput per shard, with storage performance automatically optimized based on your compute and storage configuration.

Online Migration for MongoDB-compatible workloads—Zero Downtime, Zero Cost

The Azure DocumentDB Migration Extension for VS Code now supports online migration, letting developers move MongoDB workloads to Azure DocumentDB with minimal disruption. The extension automates bulk copy and real-time sync, supports private endpoints, and requires no manual setup.

Index Advisor (Preview): AI-Powered Performance Tuning

Index Advisor for Azure DocumentDB (Preview) brings AI-driven index recommendations directly into VS Code. It analyzes slow queries, diagnoses inefficiencies, and lets users apply optimized indexes in a click—removing guesswork from performance tuning.

AI Innovation in Azure Cosmos DB

Build data-aware agents with the new Azure Cosmos DB MCP Toolkit

Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL now offers an MCP Toolkit for use with Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, now available in public preview. This integration enables Foundry Agents to securely access operational data in Azure Cosmos DB, perform semantic and vector searches, and execute data operations in real time.

By deploying the Azure Cosmos DB MCP Toolkit Server in your environment, you can quickly connect agents to live data with ready-to-use tools that simplify configuration and discovery—allowing agents to retrieve context-rich information for reasoning and task execution.

Float16 Vectors, Faster Search, and Multilingual Full-Text

Azure Cosmos DB now supports Float16 vector embeddings, reducing storage costs by up to 50%. Engine optimizations deliver 30% faster vector ingestion and 300% lower P99 latency. Full-text search adds fuzzy matching (GA) and new languages (Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese), making global AI and search workloads easier than ever.

Semantic Reranking (Private Preview)

Semantic Reranking, now in private preview, lets developers reorder search results by semantic meaning—across vector, full-text, or hybrid queries—using Azure AI Search’s proprietary models.

Security and Performance updates

Dynamic Data Masking (Preview)

Dynamic Data Masking for Azure Cosmos DB (Preview) enables real-time, role-based masking of sensitive data (PII, PHI) at the database layer—no code changes required. This simplifies compliance and protects data instantly based on user roles.

Safe Account Key Rotation (Private Preview)

Account Key Usage Metadata helps teams avoid outages during key rotation by showing when each key was last used. This feature supports safe migration to Entra ID and improves security hygiene for Azure Cosmos DB customers.

Azure  Cosmos DB SRE Agent: Smarter Diagnostics

The new Azure Cosmos DB SRE Agent integrates with Application Insights to deliver deep diagnostics, root cause analysis, and actionable recommendations for reliability, performance, and cost optimization.

Operating Azure Cosmos DB at scale

We’re also introducing powerful new capabilities to help you operate Azure Cosmos DB at scale. Fleet pools, now generally available, let you simplify capacity management by creating a shared pool of throughput (RU/s) across accounts. You get the security and performance isolation of per-tenant accounts while reducing overprovisioning and improving cost efficiency for multitenant SaaS applications.

We also announced public preview of Azure Cosmos DB Fleet Analytics which unifies insights across multiple accounts, subscriptions, and workloads. You can analyze performance, usage, and billing trends in one place to optimize resources, manage growth, and drive consistent operations at scale.

Session highlights: What went down on Day 1 & what’s next

BRK134: Modern data, modern apps: Innovation with Microsoft Databases

CVP of Azure Databases Shireesh Thota’s “Modern data, modern apps: Innovation with Microsoft Databases” was a highlight for anyone following Azure database innovation. Attendees got a first look at all the new features across the Azure Database portfolio including Azure DocumentDB GA, the latest in AI-powered search in Azure Cosmos DB, and the GA of Cosmos DB in Microsoft Fabric and Cosmos Mirroring. The session featured live demos, a customer spotlight on Adobe, and deep dives into how the latest database capabilities are unlocking new possibilities for developers and enterprises.

THR708: Vibe coding: Ship it faster with GitHub Copilot and Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB product leads Sajee Sinnathurai and Jay Gordon taught how to dramatically cut down app development time with a vibe coding session, using the Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator, GitHub Copilot, and the VS Code extension for local development.

Still to come

BRK132: Move fast, save more with MongoDB-compatible workloads on DocumentDB

Dive into Azure DocumentDB and discover how the open-source, MongoDB-compatible database service empowers developers to build and scale modern applications with ease. This session covers new features, migration strategies, and real-world insights from Kraft Heinz for deploying Azure DocumentDB BRK200: Agentic AI for creatives with Azure AI Foundry and Data

Unleash creativity with agentic AI in this breakout featuring an all-star customer panel with Pantone, TomTom, and Kantar. Learn how these organizations are using Azure AI Foundry and Azure databases like Azure Cosmos DB and Azure SQL Database to transform their creative workflows—from semantic search and generative design to AI agents that collaborate with designers and creators.

BRK133: How Sitecore built a scalable, isolated SaaS platform on Azure

Learn how to tackle multi-tenant SaaS challenges with real-world strategies for tenant isolation, cost management, and reliability. You’ll hear from Jeff Ilse, VP Platform Architecture at Sitecore, how his team used Azure Cosmos DB to scale global workloads while balancing cost and isolation.

BRK155: Sam’s Club transforms retail mission-critical apps with Azure

Gautam Chandra, director of software engineering at Sam’s Club’s, shares how the retail giant reimagined legacy systems for resilience and scale using Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB. Get actionable guidance for transforming monolithic architectures—so you can confidently modernize your own mission-critical workloads.

BRK228: Real-time analytics and AI apps with Cosmos DB in Fabric

Join us to discover how Azure Cosmos DB and Microsoft Fabric unlock real-time intelligence for AI-driven apps. You’ll learn hands-on patterns for ML-training, real-time processing, and building recommendation systems with vector search and collaborative filtering – plus best practices for deploying and scaling AI workloads in production.

BRK135: From DEV to PROD: How to build agentic memory with Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB’s advanced search and retrieval features make it easy to manage agentic memories and operational data for multi-agent systems. Hear firsthand from Walmart and IntelePeer as they share how Azure Cosmos DB powers their AI apps—giving you proven patterns and real-world inspiration to elevate your own agentic solutions.

BRK131: How Veeam delivers planet-scale semantic search with Azure Cosmos DB

Discover how Veeam, a software company specializing in data backup and recovery, transformed enterprise data discovery using Azure Cosmos DB’s AI-powered search capabilities. Join Zack Rossman from Veeam as he shares how his team built a scalable, hybrid search engine leveraging vector and full-text search, AI, and Azure Cosmos DB.

Lab: Multi-Agent Apps with Microsoft Agent Framework or LangGraph

Don’t miss our lab on building multi-agent apps with Azure Cosmos DB – happening twice this week.

You’ll design and launch a multi‑agent application powered by MCP (Model Context Protocol)—your choice of Microsoft Agent Framework in C# or LangGraph in Python. You’ll wire agents to do real work: define roles and tools, call external services, and give them memory and shared state so they collaborate intelligently instead of starting from scratch each turn.

Under the hood, you’ll plug in Azure Cosmos DB for blazing‑fast, planet‑scale persistence and retrieval—then light up semantic search to make your agents context‑aware and instantly useful. Walk out with a working agentic app you can demo the same day!

Session 1: Weds, Nov. 19, 11:45-1:00 PM PST

Session 2: Thurs, Nov. 20, 2:45-4:00 PM PST

Drop by our booths for conversation and swag

If you haven’t yet visited the Azure Cosmos DB or Azure DocumentDB booths, swing by to meet with our product experts, see demos, and pick up some swag. Attend an Azure Cosmos DB breakout session and get your exclusive Cosmos DB patch to put on your Herschel belt bag.

Have more questions about a breakout session, announcement, or something new you heard about? Join one of our conversation corners:

• Weds, Nov. 19, 4:30 PM (“Innovate with AI apps and agents” area): PM for Azure Cosmos DB for over 10 years – ask me anything! (ft. Andrew Liu)
• Thurs, Nov. 20, 1 PM (“Unify your data estate” area): Real-time analytics & AI apps with Cosmos DB in Fabric (ft. Mark Brown and Jai Maldonado)

Enjoy the rest of Ignite!