Azure Cosmos DB Blog
The latest news, updates and technical insights from the Azure Cosmos DB team
Latest posts
7 tips to optimize Azure Cosmos DB costs for AI and agentic workloads
AI apps and agentic workloads expose inefficiencies in your data layer faster than any previous generation of apps. You’re storing embeddings, serving low-latency retrieval, handling bursty traffic from chat and orchestration, and often operating across regions. Done right, Azure Cosmos DB can support these patterns with high performance and cost controls built in. Done wrong, it is easy to over-provision or pay for inefficient queries. Insights from a recently published Azure Cosmos DB cost savings white paper, combined with guidance from Microsoft leader John Savill and real-world feedback from Azure Cosmos ...
General Availability: Dynamic Data Masking for Azure Cosmos DB
Protecting sensitive data is a foundational requirement for modern applications. As organizations scale their use of Azure Cosmos DB across teams, environments, and workloads, controlling who can see sensitive information becomes increasingly important. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) for Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL. This capability helps protect sensitive data by automatically masking it for users who do not have permission to view the original values, without requiring changes to application code or data models. Dynamic Data Masking helps teams reduce...
Scalable AI with Azure Cosmos DB: Tredence Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
Azure Cosmos DB enables scalable AI-driven document processing, addressing one of the biggest barriers to operational scale in today’s enterprise AI landscape. Organizations continue to manage massive volumes of structured and unstructured content—contracts, regulatory filings, operational records, images, and field documentation—yet many workflows remain fragmented, manual, and slow. In this month's edition of our Scalable AI with Azure Cosmos DB series, we featured Tredence and their production-grade Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution—an Azure-native architecture designed to transform document-heav...
Introducing the Azure Cosmos DB Plugin for Cursor
We're excited to announce the Cursor plugin for Azure Cosmos DB bringing AI-powered database expertise, best practices guidance, and live database connectivity directly into your coding workflow. Whether you're designing a new data model, optimizing queries, or building a RAG application with vector search, the Cursor plugin gives your AI assistant deep knowledge of Azure Cosmos DB so you can write better code, faster. What's in the Plugin The Azure Cosmos DB plugin bundles three capabilities: Finding and Installing the Plugin From the Cursor Marketplace That's it. The rules ar...
Azure Cosmos DB at FOSSASIA Summit 2026: Sessions, Conversations, and Community
The FOSSASIA Summit 2026 was an incredible gathering of developers, open-source contributors, startups, and technology enthusiasts from across the region. This year, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure DocumentDB were present at the summit with both technical sessions and a dedicated booth, giving us a great opportunity to connect with the community and talk about building modern applications with cloud-native databases. A Personal Note This was my third time attending FOSSASIA, and it was special in many ways. It was also my first time attending the summit in Bangkok, Thailand, and the venue and overall experience w...
Now Generally Available: Cosmos DB Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric with Private Networks
We’re excited to announce the general availability of private network support for Azure Cosmos DB mirroring in Microsoft Fabric, enabling customers to replicate operational data into Fabric from Azure Cosmos DB accounts secured with private endpoints or virtual networks while continuing to operate within their existing network security models. As more organizations connect operational data with analytics and AI to power new insights and intelligent applications, the ability to do so securely has become increasingly important—making private network support a key capability for bringing operational data into Fabric...
A Look Ahead at Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026: From AI Agents to Global Scale
Join us for Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026, a free global, virtual developer event focused on building modern applications with Azure Cosmos DB. This year, Azure Cosmos DB Conf will feature 21 speakers from across the globe, bringing together Microsoft engineers, community leaders, architects, and developers to share how they are building modern applications with Azure Cosmos DB. Attendees will hear directly from experts using Azure Cosmos DB to power real systems—from AI agent memory architectures and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines to globally distributed event-driven micros...
Azure DocumentDB: A Fully Managed MongoDB-Compatible Database
Running MongoDB at scale eventually forces a trade-off: invest heavily in managing your own infrastructure or move to a managed service and risk losing the compatibility and portability your team depends on. Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed, MongoDB-compatible database on Azure, built on an MIT-licensed open-source engine that runs consistently across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Developers keep the skills and tooling they already have. Infrastructure teams get a pricing model built on compute and storage, with no licensing fees and no throughput unit calculations. Key Capabilities ...
Maximize Azure Cosmos DB Performance with Azure Advisor Recommendations
In the first post of this series, we introduced how Azure Advisor helps Azure Cosmos DB users uncover opportunities to optimize efficiency and make smarter decisions. This follow-up dives deeper into one of the most important categories of guidance: performance. If you've ever dealt with skewed workloads, unexpected RU consumption, or queries that don’t scale as expected, Azure Advisor surfaces exactly the insights you need to diagnose and improve them. In this post, you’ll learn what performance recommendations Advisor provides, why they matter, and how you can use them to enhance the speed, reliability, a...
Building AI-Powered Apps with Azure Cosmos DB and the Vercel AI SDK
The Vercel AI SDK is an open-source TypeScript toolkit that provides the core building blocks for integrating AI into any JavaScript application. It works with 20+ AI providers out of the box—including OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and more—so you can write your code once and switch providers by changing a single import. At its core, the SDK handles streaming (responses appear word-by-word instead of making users wait), tool calling (allowing the AI to invoke your functions, such as querying a database), and multi-step agentic reasoning, where the AI chains multiple tool calls together to a...
How to Enable Microsoft Entra ID for Azure Cosmos DB (NoSQL)
Strengthen Identity Security and Eliminate Account Keys Identity is becoming the new security perimeter. As organizations modernize their cloud applications, long‑lived secrets and shared keys introduce unnecessary risk. Azure Cosmos DB now fully supports Microsoft Entra ID for both control plane and data plane access, giving customers a secure, passwordless, least‑privilege alternative to legacy key‑based authentication. This blog walks through why customers are moving to Entra ID, what changes when you disable local authentication, and how to configure modern RBAC for Cosmos DB. Why Move to Microsoft Entra...
Part 2: Building a Python CRUD API with Azure Functions and Azure Cosmos DB
Series: Building Serverless Applications with Azure Functions and Azure Cosmos DB In the first post of this series, we focused on establishing the fundamentals of serverless architecture by building and deploying a simple HTTP API using Azure Functions and FastAPI. The post centred on serverless compute, showing how Azure Functions handles execution, scaling, and infrastructure management while FastAPI provides a modern, developer-friendly API framework. In this post, we extend that foundation by introducing serverless data. You’ll build a Python-based CRUD inventory API and persist data using Azure Cosmos DB...
Azure Cosmos DB Data Explorer now supports Dark Mode
If you spend time in the Azure Portal’s using Azure Cosmos DB Data Explorer, you know it’s a “lots of screens, lots of tabs, lots of work happening” kind of place. So I’m excited to share a small upgrade that makes a big difference: Dark Mode is now supported in Cosmos DB Data Explorer. It just works with Azure Portal Dark Mode If you already have Dark Mode enabled in the Azure Portal, Data Explorer will automatically switch to dark with it. No extra setup, no separate preference buried in a panel somewhere. If you want to switch on the on demand, you can also use the sun/moon toggle in the Data Explorer...
Azure Cosmos DB TV Recap – From Burger to Bots – Agentic Apps with Cosmos DB and LangChain.js | Ep. 111
In Episode 111 of Azure Cosmos DB TV, host Mark Brown is joined by Yohan Lasorsa to explore how developers can build agent-powered applications using a fully serverless architecture. This episode focuses on a practical, end-to-end example that demonstrates how transactional application data and AI-driven experiences can coexist on a single platform without introducing additional infrastructure or operational overhead. The session walks through a sample application inspired by a familiar business scenario: a simple ordering system. What begins as a traditional REST-based business API evolves into an agent-enabl...
Accelerate Your Cosmos DB Infrastructure with GitHub Copilot CLI and Azure Cosmos DB Agent Kit
Modern infrastructure work is increasingly agent driven, but only if your AI actually understands the platform you’re deploying. This guide shows how to turn GitHub Copilot CLI into an Azure Cosmos DB aware infrastructure expert by loading the Azure Cosmos DB Agent Kit. In under a minute, you’ll give Copilot deep, opinionated knowledge of Azure Cosmos DB best practices so it can review, generate, and optimize your Terraform, Bicep, Docker, and CI/CD configurations directly from your terminal. TL;DR — Get Started in 30 Seconds That's it! Copilot CLI now has expert-level Azure Cosmos DB infrastructure knowl...
Azure Cosmos DB TV Recap: Supercharging AI Agents with the Azure Cosmos DB MCP Toolkit (Ep. 110)
In Episode 110 of Azure Cosmos DB TV, host Mark Brown is joined by Sajeetharan Sinnathurai to explore how the Azure Cosmos DB MCP Toolkit is changing the way developers build, deploy, and scale AI agents using real application data. As agentic AI systems evolve, one challenge continues to surface: securely and consistently connecting AI agents to operational data—without rewriting integration logic for every platform. This episode takes a deep dive into how the Model Context Protocol (MCP), along with Azure Azure Cosmos DB’s implementation, addresses that challenge. Why MCP Matters for AI Agents At its cor...
Introducing the Azure Cosmos DB Agent Kit: Your AI Pair Programmer Just Got Smarter
The Azure Cosmos DB Agent Kit is an open-source collection of skills that teaches your AI coding assistant (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Gemini CLI) expert-level Azure Cosmos DB best practices. Install with one command, get production-ready guidance instantly. The Challenge Every Azure Cosmos DB Developer Faces You're building a new application with Azure Cosmos DB. You've got your data, you've got your queries, but then come the questions that keep you up at night: These aren't trivial questions. Poor decisions here can mean the difference between a blazing-fast application and one that...
Part 1: Building Your First Serverless HTTP API on Azure with Azure Functions & FastAPI
Introduction This post is Part 1 of the series Serverless Application Development with Azure Functions and Azure Cosmos DB, where we explore how to build end-to-end serverless applications using Azure Functions for compute and Azure Cosmos DB for storage. Together, these services allow you to build scalable, event-driven, cost-efficient cloud solutions without managing servers or infrastructure. Throughout the series, you’ll progressively build real application components starting with simple HTTP APIs, adding persistent storage, implementing event-driven patterns using the Cosmos DB Change Feed, and orches...