The Cosmos Big Data Platform at Microsoft: Over a Decade of Progress and a Decade to Look Forward

The twenty-first century has been dominated by the need for large scale data processing, marking the birth of big data platforms such as Cosmos. This paper describes the evolution of the exabyte-scale Cosmos big data platform at Microsoft; our journey right from scale and reliability all the way to efficiency and usability, and our next steps towards improving security, compliance, and support for heterogeneous analytics scenarios. We discuss how the evolution of Cosmos parallels the evolution of the big data field, and how the changes in the Cosmos workloads over time parallel the changing requirements of users across industry.

Automated summary

The paper discusses the evolution of the exabyte-scale Cosmos big data platform at Microsoft, focusing on improvements in scale, reliability, efficiency, and usability, as well as future plans to enhance security, compliance, and support for heterogeneous analytics scenarios. It also explores how the evolution of Cosmos aligns with the development of the big data field and how changes in Cosmos workloads mirror the evolving requirements of industry users.