I’m excited to be speaking at Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026, a free virtual developer event co-hosted by Microsoft and the Azure Cosmos DB community. Join us on April 28, 2026 for a full 5-hour live show featuring expert sessions on AI and RAG architectures, vector search, MCP servers, data modeling, distributed systems, and more.

Presentation

A big part of my work at responsiveX is helping customers build massively scalable distributed systems — ones that have to be genuinely reliable, with aggressive uptime requirements and, often, high throughput under real production load. When you’re operating at that scale, the problems that sound simple in a whiteboard conversation get complicated fast. Coordination is one of those problems. How do you ensure a job runs exactly once across multiple nodes? How do you orchestrate a long-running workflow that spans services and might fail partway through? How do you prevent race conditions when your system is deployed across regions and retries are a fact of life?

Those are the kinds of questions I’m constantly working through with customers, and Cosmos DB turns out to be a surprisingly good foundation for solving them, if you understand how to use it correctly. That’s what this session is about.

Distributed Locks, Sagas, and Coordination with Cosmos DB

In distributed systems, “just put a lock around it” sounds reasonable — until you add retries, multiple regions, and a job that can run twice. Under real load you get duplicate processing, stuck workflows, and race conditions that only appear when everything is slow and concurrent.

In this session I’ll show you how to use Cosmos DB as a coordination mechanism for distributed workflows, from basic lock/lease and leader-style patterns to saga orchestration for long-running work. We’ll focus on the correctness tradeoffs teams run into in production:

• Lock and lease patterns using Cosmos DB’s optimistic concurrency
• Leader election approaches and what breaks them at scale
• Saga orchestration for long-running, multi-step workflows
• Dealing with contention and hotspots under real load
• How consistency choices affect what your system can safely assume across regions
• Retry strategies and idempotency when things go wrong

This session is for architects, senior developers, and anyone building systems where correctness under failure actually matters.

Event Details

Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Time: 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM PDT
Location: Virtual (Online) — free to attend

Event Highlights

• Five hours of live content from Microsoft engineers and community experts.
• Sessions spanning AI and RAG architectures, vector search, MCP servers, security, data modeling, and distributed systems.
• Presented in partnership with AMD, bringing the biggest lineup in the conference’s six-year history.
• Completely free to attend — no travel required.

Register here: Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026

You can also find my speaker page and full session abstract at: https://developer.azurecosmosdb.com/conf/#speaker/eric-boyd

About the Conference

Azure Cosmos DB Conf is the annual free virtual developer conference co-hosted by Microsoft and the Azure Cosmos DB community. This is the 6th edition of the event, and it’s expanded this year thanks to AMD’s sponsorship. Whether you’re just getting started with Cosmos DB or running it at scale across multiple regions, there’s something here for you.