| 2021’s Ignite shows off new Cosmos DB features Microsoft’s second virtual Ignite conference is promoting new Azure data services, including major upgrades to its planet-scale distributed database. At the heart of Azure is a set of foundational services. They’re the technologies Microsoft uses to build its platform, giving it the tools to deliver reliable, scalable applications, and they’re the first to be deployed in any new Azure data center or region. Many of them never get to leave the background, but those that do are powerful, cloud-native, distributed-computing tools that can help you build and run massive applications that can run at global scale across regions, scaling to millions of users and petabytes of data.