Episode 4 - Azure Cosmos DB with Jay Gordon

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Microsoft Community Insight podcast, where we share insights and stories from community experts to stay up to date in Azure. My name is Nicholas and I'll be your host today In this podcast. We will dive into Cosmos DB, but before we start I would remind you to subscribe to our podcast on social media so you never miss an episode and it helps reach amazing people like yourself. So today we have a special guest today called Jay Gordon. Can you please introduce yourself please?

Speaker 2: 0:44

Sure. Hi everybody. My name is Jay Gordon. I am a senior program manager here at Microsoft, working specifically on the Azure Cosmos DB project. Before I worked at Microsoft in that role, I was also a cloud advocate. So, like many of our cloud advocates out there, trying to help people understand how to use Azure, implement their different ideas, have them. Basically, the way I always put it is I'm R2D2. My job is to help you be the superhero, and I feel like I kind of do that now. So I work in specifically growth and community, so I'm helping people be superheroes by kind of just being a navigator. I'm in the back of the X-Wing.

Speaker 1: 1:34

Yeah, that's brilliant to hear so as part of the cloud advocate. So what are the best methods of platform we can meet you and connect with the wider developer community.

Speaker 2: 1:48

Sure. Well, now it's a program manager. I am not quite as in the public as much as I used to be, because what I used to do a lot of is a lot of streaming social media going on places like Reddit, using all those channels to be able to interact with different people who have interests around Cosmos DB. One of my regular things that I like to do is I kind of watch Twitter a lot and I like to see or X, whatever it's called now and I like to kind of take a look at what people are currently saying, finding trends and also answering questions. Sometimes people just want to have somebody notice that they're concerned with some specific problem they're having. They want questions about a feature. They may even just want to say I love the product or I hate the product. I don't care whether you love me, you hate me, as long as you're paying attention to me and you know I'm there. But yeah, there's a lot of great ways to reach and connect.

Speaker 1: 2:55

I also like so in your opinion, would you think X more preferred than LinkedIn over getting better content? And then there's white Canadian journalists out there on popular posts that they tend to just hold something up everyday, ray.

Speaker 2: 3:06

Yeah, I was going to get to that. Linkedin tends to be the perfect way to get in touch with me and have me, or even the Azure Cosmos DB LinkedIn page being able to send us notifications with the same time me sending you all this different information new product features, news, blog posts, videos we do all of it. Youtube, another fantastic channel. Youtube may be one of the strongest ways of being able to communicate with developers and different people in the IT world, mainly because, let's face it, not a lot of us have time to sit down and read. We just kind of want the notes, we want these executive reports, we want the demo, we want to learn how to do it and then start executing. So, video strong way to communicate with the community.

Speaker 1: 3:56

Yeah, how would you, as a person in the Cosmos DB team, collect feedback and request from users, in that, in particular, that one to one learn from Cosmos DB and communicate to the product team?

Speaker 2: 4:14

So we have some channels specifically for our MVPs where we can communicate with them directly and get feedback. We have some internal channels. We have a direct. So if you want to get access to some of those channels and also NDA information, the perfect thing to do is strive to be part of our MVP program at Microsoft. It's a really great way to be able to get a direct contact with people on product teams. There's also other ways to get that feedback and different requests. Like I said, social media tends to be a really popular way. People can easily just pop an idea. Another great way to get feedback, like I said, is Reddit. Look at what people are saying. Also, doing things like having direct conversations with people.

Speaker 2: 5:07

One of the things I like to do when I go to events is to spend some time. I always like working booths. I always have readers. Back when I was a cloud advocate, I liked working booths. Now I just work one for the AI store that rolled through here in New York City At Build this past year. I worked with booth there. We had a small MVP event where we invited people out on Redmond for pizza and drinks, just having conversations with people and saying, hey, what's working for you. What would you like to see Then? Taking that information and bringing it back to people on our product team to have some sort of influence? There's also things like user voice, where you can send in direct feature requests. We need to be able to hear from the people who are using the product. We also need to hear from the people who have not quite used the product yet, but are thinking about it. Getting requests and feedback from them is super important.

Speaker 1: 6:15

I know Microsoft is very good at getting feedback, like all teams and stuff In your current role. What are the most common challenges or barriers that you face and you overcome in your role?

Speaker 2: 6:29

Some of the big challenges sometimes can tend to be sourcing content. There's a term content is king. It can be queen or whatever else we want to call it. Content is one of the most important parts of being able to grow a product and be an advocate for it. It can be a lot of work at times to be able to source all that content, especially from the remote community like the outbound community. We want to be able to give them incentives to be able to spend that time to write something, to contribute something. That's what's nice about the MVP program they're a great place to go and source content from when we need it Most. In general content creation, because it requires a lot of creativity as well.

Speaker 2: 7:18

I've had to sit and kind of really take broad views of what other people are doing, the types of blog posts that work, and also like correlating tactics to metrics. I mean, let's face it, whether you're checking out how well a Application is performing or you want to see how well a tactic for social media is going, having metrics associated with that Really can be markers for success. So you want to see how to reduce the amount of Like 502 errors in your application. You're gonna ultimately look at metrics. You're gonna check blogs. You're gonna find why something isn't working and make corrections, right or a fix. The same can be said for other things. In trying to have outreach with people in the community, you look at what works. You kind of look back at the metrics associated with what did and what didn't, and then you make Decisions on how to change tactics.

Speaker 2: 8:13

You may need to just patch a problem. It could be just Somehow or another. You're not reaching the right people. You want to. So you find a fix. You add that passion. You hope that it works and if not, sometimes you got to Take the repo, clean it out, clone it again and try again, because you know sometimes rebasing your repo can be a little bit different. Well, going backwards can be a little different difficult. Sometimes you got to start from scratch. You got to look at what wasn't working, create a new branch and go from there.

Speaker 1: 8:48

Yeah, so in you, for example, it Microsoft celebrates success and you can't roll. How would you, as a, in your role, how will you do celebrate the success stories for your customers and partners?

Speaker 2: 9:02

Sure, um, yeah, yeah, um, celebrating our Developers, our contributors, the people out in our community. It's so important to sometimes send a message directly and to say, hey, I really like that post, so you know what I'm gonna do with it. I'm gonna spread it out to the world as much as I possibly can. So I really love finding ways to kind of say to someone you spent the time to curate a certain amount of content around Cosmos TV and I want to celebrate it. I've also done things like a male people gifts On behalf of our team. We sat has a really cool swag that we sent out to people. It's a really nice tote bags. You can probably you can see the the tote bag right there on my door that's behind me. That's one of them. We had these really cool tote bags.

Speaker 2: 9:58

We also have done some really cool stuff around our conference, which I'll talk a little bit about. But our conference, all of our speakers always get a really nice gift. They are people who have wins. They have wins because they are literally Talking to us about those success stories. They're coming. So that's another really great way of celebrating is by giving people a speaking slot on our conferences. So, specifically as your cosmos TV calm, which we have once a year. So hearing from our community, having to submit ideas, being able to go ahead and give them a platform that tends to be a real big way we try to celebrate people is giving them a platform to share.

Speaker 1: 10:39

Brilliant. Today's episode is Cosmos DB theme, and then we'll find out what are the most recent or upcoming announcements in Cosmos DB that you're very exciting about, that you want to share.

Speaker 2: 10:53

Sure. So we were talking about metrics logging just before. A lot of people need that information to be able to be within compliance of some needs of their company. So we've got PGI for our post-press product, being able to give people just better visibility into how things are doing. We've got the Azure AI Advantage. That's something I'm really excited about, because we're looking for ways to get more people onboarded to AI services that we have here at Azure, and one of the cool things is the support that we will give you along that road. One of the things that we're doing right now is we're giving people 40,000 request units if they are a existing co-pilot user or Azure open AI user. So if they have access to that service, we are going to give people who sign up 40,000 request units that they can use towards an Azure Cosmos DB account something like $6,000 in savings. So I find that to be pretty dang exciting because I want people to start using the platform and one of the reasons people are wanting to use the platform and another big announcement we have recently was Vector Search in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB V-Core going GA.

Speaker 2: 12:19

People want to have Vector Search capable databases. Right now. It's so important. People are building AI app forward applications Rather than utilizing, say, azure Search. You can use Vector Search directly with Azure Cosmos DB. That's great Our free tier for that particular offering. So let's say you want to try this Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB V-Core, but you don't want to use a credit card point yet you want a free tier. You go to akams, slash tricosmosdb. You get a free account. Give it a shot for 30 days. Use your own data integration with Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB V-Core, for Azure Open AI. Another great recent announcement came out a few months ago. We've got some really great example applications as well, so you can do a search. I'll see if there's some notes I can give you that Nicholas can go ahead and share with you.

Speaker 1: 13:28

Yeah, brilliant. So has this episode come into an end? What advice would you give someone who's just starting out with Cosmos DB?

Speaker 2: 13:40

So my advice is one, realize and see developer forward platform. We want developers to realize that databases and sorry, frito the pup, he's having a good time out there Nice yeah. So being able to think about these things and the developer standpoint really big. The SDKs that we've got available. Read that documentation around those SDKs, try out the free tier and then look at some examples. We've got this great repository of design patterns, so different design patterns for no SQL that you can use. There's some demo apps there.

Speaker 2: 14:21

I'll share that with you as well, nicholas. That's a great place to get started, especially if you're, say, a C sharpnet developer. There's a bunch of them in C sharp If you're using something like Python or Java so many examples as well. Try some of the demo applications. Also, if you're new, one of the things I really like is Microsoft Learn. There's a bunch of Cosmos DB forward modules that you can take. It's free training, so check out Microsoft Learn. There's a whole bunch of tracks that allow you to start learning about Cosmos DB and one of the cool things is there are sandboxes, so it's another. You don't need to commit any money, you just go ahead, you start using it.

Speaker 1: 15:10

Yeah, so one of the things that we love to ask individual like yourself is like get to know you as a person. So are you going to any events like tech events in the future, aside from Cosmos DBcom?

Speaker 2: 15:23

I am going to be doing virtually the MVP summit. I'll be helping out James Cadella, who's going to be doing a great AI talk. I'll be moderating from remote and interacting with our MVPs and our audience in general, but it's pretty much an MVP audience. So we've got the MVP summit coming up and myself I'm not really traveling right now. I'm really enjoying being home and planning as your Cosmos DB Conf, which is coming up on April 16th of this year. So be part akams slash adger Cosmos DB Conf.

Speaker 1: 16:04

No, it's brilliant. Any last words you would like to say to our viewers, jay?

Speaker 2: 16:12

Great power comes from great responsibility, so make sure that what you're building, you understand, you implement properly, you document and you make it easy for people to collaborate. Be part of what you're doing Okay, brilliant Thanks.

Speaker 1: 16:30

So thanks for coming to this podcast, jay, and in a few weeks it's going to be on Spotify and Apple Music. And stay tuned, bye, bye, bye.