Mark Brown Product · People · Platforms

Selected work

Product direction. Practical proof.

I lead, build, and contribute. These public projects show different parts of that work—from guiding open-source contributors to making complex platforms easier to use.

Shared work. Specific contributions.

Open-source stewardship

Azure Cosmos DB Data Migration Tool

Extensible, cross-platform import and export with configurable sources and sinks.

Gives developers a way to move data between systems and extend the tool for additional formats and sources.

My role

When my team was going to deprecate an engineering owned data migration tool, I worked with a group of community members to create a new one and open source it so others could contribute as well. I launched the open-source tool and am the lead maintainer guiding contributor development.

JSON, MongoDB, and SQL Server extensions implement shared interfaces and are loaded by the migration tool's core composition container. View full-size image
Extension-based architecture for the migration tool. Image source

Cross-team initiative

Banking Multi-Agent Workshop

Banking scenarios that teach agent collaboration in LangGraph and Microsoft Agent Framework through exercises and reference solutions.

Helps developers work through multi-agent patterns in a concrete domain instead of starting with a blank project.

My role

Initiated the workshop, created all of the deployment infrastructure, heavily contributed to the technical content and provided cross-organizational guidance to continuing contributors.

Banking workshop architecture connects an Angular app on App Service to Agent Framework and LangGraph, Cosmos DB, Azure OpenAI, deployment, and observability services. View full-size image
Workshop architecture from the LangGraph branch. Image source

Connecting product experiences

Cosmos DB in Fabric Samples

Samples covering CRUD, vector search, Spark, Power BI, reverse ETL, and translytical workflows.

Gives developers concrete ways to explore how operational data, analytics, and AI fit together.

My role

Created the samples gallery, authored most of the samples and guided fellow contributors.

Reverse ETL semantic-search demo shows a natural-language customer query, similar customer result cards, and demonstration metrics. View full-size image
Reverse ETL semantic-search demo with example customer results. Image source

Extending a shared platform

Travel Multi-Agent Workshop

A build-along travel assistant with persistent agent memory and optional Fabric modules for observability, analytics, optimization, and reverse ETL.

Lets developers explore how agent memory and analytical feedback can inform governed, reversible actions.

My role

Created the workshop/sample experience and all of the infrastructure deployment. Drove the agent analytics and optimization expansion, connecting persistent memory with Fabric insights and governed, reversible actions.

Agent Optimization Dashboard overview displays captured-run metrics and charts comparing models and conversation turns. View full-size image
Agent analytics and optimization dashboard, showing a demonstration run. Image source

Developer learning

Cosmos DB Design Patterns

Runnable NoSQL data-modeling and architecture examples covering concurrency, partitioning, event-driven designs, and vector search.

Helps developers explore coordination and failure scenarios in working code, making distributed-systems design choices easier to understand.

In focus: Distributed lock

An interactive playground makes lock contention, lease renewal, crash recovery, and fencing-token protection visible through competing workers backed by Cosmos DB.

My role

Initiated this project and was a major contributor, expanding practical examples and improving the developer learning experience.

Distributed-lock playground shows competing workers, lock-holder and renewal controls, protected resources, fencing tokens, and an event timeline. View full-size image
Distributed-lock playground with competing workers and a live event timeline. Image source

More from the workbench

Architecture & deployment

Focused examples that make infrastructure choices and distributed-systems trade-offs easier to explore.

Focused deployment example

Cosmos Web App Network Sample

A public-facing web app connected to Cosmos DB through private networking and managed identity.

Helps developers compare Private Link with service-endpoint and VNet-rule connectivity in a deployable example.

My role

Authored the deployment sample.

Architecture learning · Earlier work

Cosmos Global Distribution Demos

Hands-on demonstrations of consistency, latency, replication, conflict resolution, and failover trade-offs.

Makes distributed-systems behavior easier to reason about through concrete experiments.

My role

Primary contributor to hands-on distributed-systems demonstrations.

Older architecture-learning material targeting earlier .NET versions—not a current production starter.

These projects include work by many people. I've described my own role rather than claiming the whole effort.

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