Browse All Posts (133)

Tina Manghnani and Pranav Pandit announce Microsoft Build updates for Hosted Agents in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, including source-code deployments via azd, built-in Content Safety guardrails, real-time voice support with WebSocket/WebRTC, and an Agent Optimizer that automates evaluation and prompt/config improvements for production agents.

dchelupati summarizes the Microsoft Build 2026 updates to Azure SRE Agent aimed at making agentic operations workable in real enterprise production environments, including private networking, governed connectors, a granular permissions model, native GitHub Enterprise support, and a private plugins marketplace for approved MCP tools and workflows.

Dalibor Kovacevic explains the new governance controls for Azure SRE Agent, focusing on how to restrict and audit what the agent can do in production using managed identity + Azure RBAC, tool-level allow/ask/deny policies, and pre-tool-use hooks that can block or rewrite calls.

Microsoft Developer shares a short announcement pointing viewers to the Microsoft Build 2026 Day 1 livestream, highlighting the opening keynote, Imagine Cup 2026 winner announcements, live coding sessions with Microsoft engineers, and product demos and announcements.

dchelupati explains how Azure SRE Agent can connect to GitHub Enterprise Cloud repositories using a Bring Your Own GitHub App model, so the agent accesses code and operational artifacts via a governed service identity instead of personal tokens. The post focuses on the auth flow, permissions, and Key Vault-backed key handling.

ebencarek explains how Azure SRE Agent can now install plugins from private GitHub repositories (including GitHub Enterprise), enabling platform teams to distribute runbooks, compliance checks, and operational playbooks across multiple agents with explicit version pinning and per-marketplace authentication.

sanchitmehta explains the new preview VNet integration for Azure SRE Agent, focused on controlling outbound (egress) traffic so the agent can reach private resources while staying inside your network and security boundaries. The post breaks down egress modes, routing paths, and the key configuration choices for production use.

Dalibor Kovacevic introduces Managed Connectors for Azure SRE Agent (preview), focusing on governance controls that limit what an agent can do with connected tools. The post explains operation-level exposure, parameter pinning, per-tool approvals, and credential isolation so policies and secrets stay outside the model’s control.

KayodePrince explains how to monitor AI coding agents by exporting OpenTelemetry (OTLP) signals and ingesting them into Azure Monitor, then using Application Insights agent views and Grafana dashboards to troubleshoot performance, understand usage, and track token-related cost signals.

KayodePrince announces general availability of direct OpenTelemetry (OTLP) ingestion into Azure Monitor, enabling teams to send logs, metrics, and traces to Azure Monitor endpoints and use Application Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus storage, and Grafana dashboards for investigation and visualization.

Lee Stott shows how to provision the Azure infrastructure for Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agents using Terraform, including the Foundry Account and Project, an OpenAI model deployment, managed identity + RBAC, monitoring with Log Analytics/Application Insights, and a GitHub Actions workflow using OIDC for CI/CD.

lrtoyou1223 announces the May 2026 on-premises data gateway release (v3000.318), adding admin consent controls for gateway diagnostics and integrating gateway logs into the Dataflow Gen2 run experience to speed up troubleshooting across dataflow logic, connectivity, authentication, and downstream systems.

John Edward walks through creating a first AI agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio, from defining the agent and connecting knowledge sources to enabling generative answers, testing conversations, and publishing to channels like Teams and websites.

Jason Pereira introduces two Azure Databricks public preview capabilities that connect Microsoft Copilot Studio and GitHub Copilot to Databricks: a workspace-wide Genie MCP endpoint for building workspace-aware agents, and Lakebase branching for debugging agent issues against real data without touching production.

Lee Stott lays out a practical GitOps approach for running Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agents in production, using GitHub as the source of truth and GitHub Actions/Tasks for validation, promotion gates, and rollback. It includes a reference architecture, repo layout, workflow examples, and security/observability guidance.

TulikaC introduces a new Azure CLI switch for az webapp deploy that surfaces richer, more actionable diagnostics when Azure App Service for Linux deployments fail, including error codes, deployment context, suggested fixes, and a Copilot-ready prompt you can paste into GitHub Copilot for follow-up guidance.

TulikaC introduces Site Status for Azure App Service for Linux, a new way to see what state your web app is in and why it might be failing. It explains the platform-defined runtime states, what “Issues Detected” shows, and when repair actions like restart or instance replacement help.

Vincent Baaij and Denis Voituron walk through what’s new in the next major version of the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor component library, with pointers to the official GitHub repo for developers who want to try it or contribute.

Rakeshginjupalli describes how KT Corporation built a secure public cloud offering on Azure Confidential Computing to meet South Korea’s privacy and sovereignty requirements, protect sensitive data in use, and migrate regulated workloads while improving performance with newer confidential VM generations.

GitHub highlights four recommended sessions to watch at Microsoft Build 2026, including talks on agentic coding and the open prompt ecosystem.

jometzg shows how to build a GitHub Copilot agent usage dashboard by exporting VS Code Copilot telemetry via OpenTelemetry to an OTLP collector running on Azure Container Apps, sending it into Application Insights/Azure Monitor, and visualizing it in Azure Managed Grafana with IaC-friendly deployment and troubleshooting steps.

Harsha Nair introduces new Kubernetes Center views in the Azure portal that help platform teams track cluster security posture and Kubernetes version support status across AKS fleets, including Defender for Containers-powered vulnerabilities and runtime alerts, plus LTS eligibility and out-of-support visibility.

BMahboob announces a public preview for Automatic OS Image Upgrades on Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) using Flexible Orchestration Mode, aimed at keeping VM fleets current with less manual work. The post outlines prerequisites, required health extensions, and the key policy settings needed to enable and monitor upgrades.

Roberto Cervantes Rivero outlines the latest Microsoft Fabric Business Events updates, focusing on how Eventstream and Activator can publish governed events, how Eventhouse stores them for KQL-based analysis, and how the new consumption model charges publishers and consumers based on event operations and listener hours.

Reynald Adolphe, Brigit Murtaugh and Lee Murray introduce the VS Code Agents window (Preview), a dedicated interface for running and steering multiple agent sessions across projects. They explain why it exists, walk through settings and theming, demo the workflow, and discuss extensibility and design goals.

Allison announces that GitHub Copilot individual (non-enterprise) plans can now access evaluation models, and that these models may be used when Copilot is set to auto model selection. The post also shows where to disable evaluation models in Copilot settings and links to the supported models documentation.

Kiefer Sheldon explains a Fabric-based pattern for showing real-time, in-report alerts inside Power BI without email. The approach treats notifications as data, writes them to a Fabric SQL database, mirrors them into a Lakehouse, and surfaces them through a semantic model so each report can display targeted alerts.

Zoey Li explains why Azure Container Registry’s global endpoint can feel opaque with Traffic Manager routing, and how new Regional Endpoints let teams pin pushes and pulls to a specific replica region while keeping the global endpoint for automatic failover.

John Savill recaps the major Microsoft AI updates from May 2026, covering new model availability in Azure AI Foundry, platform features like evaluation and networking, and notable changes across Copilot Studio and GitHub Copilot.

Allison announces that usage-based billing for GitHub Copilot is now live for all users, with Copilot code review now consuming GitHub Actions minutes in addition to GitHub AI Credits. The update also adds user-level budget controls for organizations and enterprises and introduces Copilot Max upgrades for higher usage limits.

LZhang shares an end-to-end, field-tested setup for running Anthropic’s Claude Code through Microsoft Foundry in VS Code, including the exact settings.json shape, required Azure RBAC roles, tenant/login pitfalls, and a troubleshooting matrix for common errors like “baseURL and resource are mutually exclusive.”

Thomas Maurer talks with Kyle Ikeda about the Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan and how Agent Commit Units (ACUs) can be used across Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, Fabric, and GitHub to make AI agent spend more predictable, with guidance on purchasing, tracking consumption, and budgeting responsibly.

This week's AI roundup focuses on what it takes to ship and operate agentic systems in real environments, from Microsoft Foundry updates (evaluation, model choice, and private networking) to clearer build-time vs run-time agent architectures. MCP kept gaining ground as the integration contract for tools, prompts, and "docs as context", with new Azure Functions prompt triggers and dedicated MCP servers for SRE workflows and Microsoft Learn grounding. On the GitHub Copilot side, enterprise rollouts got more practical with Claude Opus 4.8 GA, model targeting rules, stronger memory controls, and usage metrics that separate access from adoption. We wrap with IDE workflow changes that push plan-review-refine loops, plus security guidance that maps OWASP agentic risks to concrete governance tooling.

This week's GitHub Copilot updates focused on making agentic work easier to manage at scale, from new model options and tighter enterprise controls to longer-running sessions you can supervise across devices. Claude Opus 4.8 reached general availability with a temporary premium request multiplier to plan around, while model rules add org-level targeting for phased rollouts. On the workflow side, VS Code continued building an agent-first experience (Agents window, remote sessions, and remote control GA), and MCP examples showed how tools, permissions, and doc grounding can make agents safer and more reliable. We also saw practical steps toward predictable behavior and measurable outcomes, with improved memory controls and new adoption cohorts in the Copilot metrics API to connect spend to real usage.

This week's ML roundup focuses on tightening the path from data to deployed models, with Microsoft Foundry expanding model options and leaning into trace-based evaluation that works across clouds. On the data side, Microsoft Fabric added features that reduce day-to-day pipeline overhead, including incremental Delta maintenance, CDC in Copy job, richer IoT streaming metadata, and new preview tooling for Excel ingestion and scheduled Spark pools. We also look at practical building blocks around ML work, from governed data exploration in Data Formulator to persistent agent memory with SQL, plus an infrastructure take on single-GPU training at the 100B+ scale and a simpler approach to Python data pipelines with dlt.

This week's DevOps roundup connects three threads that show up everywhere in modern delivery: supply chain risk, agent-driven automation, and platform guardrails that actually enforce policy. Microsoft flagged new npm install-time attack campaigns, a reminder that lifecycle hooks inherit your CI and workstation permissions unless you tighten token scope and credential exposure. On the automation side, guidance and tooling updates pushed agents toward production discipline (tool contracts, grounding, eval gates, and auditability), while GitHub and Azure shipped governance knobs like Code Quality enablement APIs, CodeQL improvements, hard budget limits for GHAS, and security baselines as code for Windows and Azure Arc.

Shawn Henry shares a curated list of Microsoft Build 2026 sessions focused on Microsoft Agent Framework and Microsoft Foundry, spanning multi-agent patterns, production-scale agent lifecycles, governance and risk controls, and observability/evals across open standards and tools.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to use the Plan agent in Visual Studio 2026 with GitHub Copilot, focusing on an AI-assisted workflow that starts from an existing solution and uses the agent to plan work before making code changes.

Andrea Griffiths and Nick Taylor introduce Pomerium on Open Source Friday, covering how the open source identity-aware proxy secures access to internal apps and services with authentication, authorization, and zero trust access patterns.

Rick Strahl explains why ASP.NET Core cookie-auth logins can “disappear” after IIS app pool recycles: the Data Protection key ring isn’t persisting, so previously issued auth cookies can’t be decrypted/validated. He shows how to fix it by enabling Load User Profile or by explicitly persisting keys to a known location.