The Universal Store Team (UST) in Microsoft is the platform powering all “storefronts” of Microsoft assets. These storefronts can be web, rich client, or brick mortar stores. This includes the commerce, fraud, risk, identity, catalog, and entitlements/license systems.
The team, in the UST, streams user engagement of paid applications, such as games, in near real-time. This data is used by Microsoft Fraud systems to identify if a customer is eligible for refund upon request. The streaming data is ingested to Azure Cosmos DB. Today, this usage data along with other insights provided by the Customer Knowledge platform forms the key factors in the refund decision. Since this infrastructure is used for UST Self-Serve refund, it is imperative that we drive down the operation cost as much as possible.
Azure Cosmos DB was chosen primarily for three reasons, guaranteed SLAs, elastic scale, and global distribution. It is crucial for the data store to keep up with the incoming stream of events with guaranteed SLAs. The storage needed to be replicated in order to serve refund queries faster across multiple regions with support for disaster recovery.
Read about it on the Azure blog.