Keynote Interview: Vercel's Guillermo Rauch on the Agent Era | Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026
Microsoft Developer hosts a keynote interview from Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026 where Kirill Gavrylyuk talks with Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO, creator of Next.js) about building a “developer cloud” for a world where AI agents write and deploy software.
Full summary based on description
What “the agent era” changes
- The discussion frames AI agents as a new “user” of developer platforms: systems that can generate, modify, and deploy code.
- A key idea is “agent ergonomics”: optimizing platforms and workflows for how agents operate (not just how humans code).
Why serverless compute + serverless data for ephemeral apps
- The interview argues that serverless compute paired with serverless data is a strong fit for short-lived, rapidly created applications (described as “ephemeral” and “vibe-coded”).
- The implication is that infrastructure should scale up/down quickly and handle bursty, unpredictable workloads.
Reliability at scale: fault isolation and noisy neighbors
- The conversation highlights the need for fault isolation to prevent one workload from impacting others.
- It calls out avoiding noisy-neighbor issues as a key requirement when operating at Vercel’s scale.
Cosmos DB query economics in a token-heavy world
- The interview connects the economics of a query to Azure Cosmos DB’s Request Unit (RU) model.
- The framing is that as token-based and agent-driven workloads increase, understanding and controlling per-query cost becomes more important.
Vercel growth on Azure Cosmos DB
- The clip claims Vercel grew its weekly deployment count 3× in months while using Azure Cosmos DB.
The next decade: “radically full-stack” engineers
- The discussion suggests developers will become more full-stack, with AI agents shifting how code is produced and shipped, and platforms needing to support that end-to-end flow.
Links mentioned
- Full keynote: https://aka.ms/CosmosConf26Keynote
- Sessions playlist: https://aka.ms/CosmosConf26Playlist
- Cosmos Conf Challenge (DP-420 voucher): https://aka.ms/CosmosDBConfChallenge
- Post-event survey: https://aka.ms/CosmosConf2026Survey
- Conference site: https://aka.ms/azurecosmosdbconf