Welcome to Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026

🎤 Keynote — 9:00 AM PT

The day kicks off with a jam-packed keynote hosted by Kirill Gavrylyuk, VP for Azure Cosmos DB at Microsoft, in conversation with leaders shaping the future of the developer cloud, AI, and the silicon underneath it all.

Joining the stage:

• Guillermo Rauch — CEO and founder of Vercel, creator of Next.js
• Jonathan Lee — Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI
• Andrew Liu — Principal GPM, Azure Cosmos DB (live demo)
• Steve Berg — CVP & GM, Server CPU Cloud, AMD

Expect a wide-ranging conversation on building modern applications, AI, and data at planetary scale — from designing for AI agents and ephemeral, vibe-coded apps, to scaling out a database to keep up with OpenAI, to the silicon that quietly powers it all.

🤖 Live demo: the Azure Cosmos DB agent. During the keynote, Andrew Liu demos the new Azure Cosmos DB agent — a purpose-built AI assistant for working with Azure Cosmos DB. It ships with a growing catalog of skills that help you make the right decisions when using Azure Cosmos DB: choosing partition keys, modeling data, designing indexes, troubleshooting RU consumption, and more. Instead of guessing at best practices, you get expert guidance — wired directly into your workflow.

🧭 Don’t miss Steve Berg on the keynote stage. As CVP & GM of Server CPU Cloud at AMD, Steve sits at the heart of the AMD–Microsoft partnership that powers Azure Cosmos DB on AMD EPYC across the globe. His perspective on where compute is going — for AI, for data, for the workloads our apps haven’t even invented yet — is one of the highlights of the morning.

💬 Keynote Interviews

Don’t miss these exclusive customer interviews during the keynote:

• Guillermo Rauch on the Agent Era — agent ergonomics, serverless data for vibe-coded apps, fault isolation at Vercel’s scale, and what RU economics mean in a token world.
• Jonathan Lee on Building at Planetary Scale — running thousands of product tables on Azure Cosmos DB, schema-less design layers, multi-region replication across dozens of regions, and transparently migrating collections between accounts as products grow.

📺 Sessions

Here’s what’s on the agenda, including both live-streamed and on-demand sessions, broken out across the following categories:

🛠️ Best Practices, Querying & Data Modeling

The fundamentals — done right the first time, because they’re painful to fix later.

• Sid Anand (Technical Fellow, Walmart) — Cosmos DB Best Practices: A Lesson from Spacely Sprockets. The Jetsons as a lens for always-on, low-latency, cost-efficient Azure Cosmos DB applications.
• James Codella (Principal PM, Azure Cosmos DB) — Querying and Indexing: The Complete Guide. A comprehensive tour of the query engine and indexing system, with the cost-saving optimizations that make the biggest difference in production.
• Hasan Savran (Microsoft Data Platform MVP) — Data Modeling Decisions That Make or Break Your App. Partition key strategy, schema tradeoffs, storage estimation, and managing cross-partition queries.

🤖 AI Agents on Cosmos DB

The patterns and platform pieces that make production AI agents fast, cheap, and stateful.

• Chander Dhall (CEO, Cazton) — Performance-Boosting Memory Patterns: Save Tokens, Cut Costs, Increase Speed. Three production memory patterns — Sliding Window, Hierarchical, and Entity-Based Memory Graphs.
• Farah Abdou (Lead ML Engineer, SmartServe) — Cutting AI Agent Costs: The Agent Memory Fabric. Vector search for semantic caching + Change Feed coordination + optimistic concurrency = dramatic cost cuts and sub-100ms agent handoffs.

🔄 Event-Driven & Multi-Cloud

• Justine Cocchi (Principal PM, Azure Cosmos DB) — Mastering the Azure Cosmos DB Change Feed. Internals, consumption models, lease management, and a live demo debugging lag in production.
• Theo van Kraay (Principal PM, Azure Cosmos DB) — MultiCloudDB: Write Once. Run Anywhere. A sneak preview of a portable Java SDK that runs unchanged across Azure Cosmos DB, Amazon DynamoDB, and Google Cloud Spanner.
• Khelan Modi (Product Manager, Azure DocumentDB) — One Codebase, Any Cloud. Build a retail store database once with MongoDB-compatible APIs, deploy on-prem via Kubernetes and fully managed on Azure — no rewrites.

🧱 Under the Hood

• Andrew Liu (Principal Group PM, Azure Cosmos DB) — Behind the Scenes: How Azure Cosmos DB Runs Under the Hood. A whiteboard walkthrough of replica sets, consistent hashing, Request Units, and RU pooling.
• Andrew Ruffin (Senior PM, AMD) — Powering Azure Cosmos DB with AMD EPYC. Nearly 10 years of EPYC in Azure, up to 35% more performance and performance-per-dollar with the newest v7 generation, and what that means for your apps.

💫 Community Spotlight

• Jess Ramos — Founder of Big Data Energy Analytics ⚡, a LinkedIn Top Voice, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor in Data & AI. She joins us to talk about building a career — and a community — for 500K+ data and AI practitioners in an AI-driven world.

🎬 Demos & Code Walkthroughs

Several sessions are built around end-to-end demos. A few we’re especially looking forward to:

• Justine Cocchi diagnoses Change Feed lag and recovers processing in production.
• Theo van Kraay shows the same Java application running unchanged across Azure Cosmos DB, DynamoDB, and Spanner.
• Farah Abdou walks through the Agent Memory Fabric architecture in a real multi-agent system.
• Andrew Liu whiteboards the Cosmos DB engine — one of the rare chances to watch a database leader sketch the system live.

🏢 Customer Stories

We’re also dropping customer story testimonials throughout the day:

• Mick Feller, Distinguished Software Engineer at The ODP Group (Office Depot) — how his team built a homegrown enterprise AI Personal Assistant on Azure Cosmos DB, with hands-off scaling as adoption doubled year over year.
• Johnny Halife, Partner at SOUTHWORKS — Azure Cosmos DB as the operational backbone for cloud-native, event-driven customer builds.

📦 On-Demand Library

The live show is just one half of Cosmos Conf 2026. An entire on-demand library publishes today alongside the broadcast, featuring extra deep-dives from across the global Cosmos DB community:

🤖 Build smarter AI apps

• Yohan Lasorsa — Beyond Vector Search. Hybrid RAG patterns that go further than embeddings alone.
• Lino Tadros — AI Agent Memory: Chat History and Semantic Caching. Practical memory designs for agents that remember.
• Pamela Fox — Identity-Aware MCP Servers. Building MCP servers that respect who is asking.

⚙️ Migrate and modernize

• Sergiy Smyrnov — ASP.NET to Cosmos DB with GitHub Copilot. AI-driven migration of a real .NET app.
• Sandeep Nair — MongoDB to Azure DocumentDB Migration. A clean migration playbook.
• Rakhi Thejraj — Importing Data into Azure Cosmos DB. The right tool for every data-load shape.

🚀 Run it well in production

• Patrick Oguaju — Cost-Efficient High-Scale Systems. Designing for scale without burning RUs.
• Sudhanshu Khera — Securing Azure Cosmos DB. Identity, network, and data-protection essentials.
• Tural Suleymani — Event-Driven Microservices. Azure Cosmos DB as the backbone of an event-driven architecture.

🛠️ Level up your dev workflow

• Sajeetharan Sinnathurai — Dev Environment Supercharged with AI. The toolchain that makes Azure Cosmos DB development genuinely fast.

📺 Browse the full playlist → https://aka.ms/CosmosConf26Playlist

🏆 Take the Cosmos Conf Challenge

While you’re watching, take the Cosmos Conf Skills Challenge. Once you’ve completed it, enter to get one of 500 vouchers for a 100% free DP-420 certification exam.

🏆 https://aka.ms/CosmosDBConfChallenge

🌌 See You at Cosmos Conf 2026

Cosmos Conf is the one day a year the entire Azure Cosmos DB universe comes together. Whatever brought you here today — building your first AI agent, modernizing a legacy system, hunting for a smarter partition key, or just curious where the database is headed next — there’s a session for you on the schedule. Stick around for all of it. Take notes. Try the demos for yourself. Take the Challenge. And tell us what you build next.

We can’t wait to see you in the chat.

Grab a coffee, queue up the stream, and we’ll see you at 9:00 AM PT.

🔗 Useful Links

• 📺 Watch live → https://aka.ms/cosmosconflive
• ▶️ Explore all sessions on-demand → https://aka.ms/CosmosConf26Playlist
• 🏆 Take the Cosmos Conf Challenge (first 500 get a free DP-420 exam voucher) → https://aka.ms/CosmosDBConfChallenge
• 📝 Post-event survey → https://aka.ms/CosmosConf2026Survey
• 🌐 Conference website → https://aka.ms/azurecosmosdbconf
• ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@AzureCosmosDB
• 𝕏 Follow on X → https://x.com/AzureCosmosDB
• 💼 Follow on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/azure-cosmos-db/