Browse All Azure Content (495)

Thomas Maurer shares takeaways from a discussion at the HPE Customer Innovation Center on Azure Local and Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud vision, focusing on how organizations can meet data residency, compliance, and operational control requirements while still using Azure-consistent capabilities in hybrid and edge environments.

davidwright walks through a practical, staged path for turning an Azure-hosted SaaS app into a transactable Azure Marketplace offer, using Git-Ape “skills” to generate version-controlled decision records for offer selection, multi-tenancy, landing zones, fulfillment/metering, security evidence, deployment blueprints, and Partner Center onboarding.

John Savill recaps the major Microsoft AI updates from August 2026, including new and updated models, routing and content-understanding changes, and a set of Copilot and Azure Copilot improvements that affect how teams use AI features across developer and enterprise environments.

Welcome to this week's Azure roundup, where the story centers on making AI agents and hybrid fleets operable, governable, and cost-aware. GPT-6 Astra reached general availability in Microsoft Foundry with production-ready deployment and governance options, while multiple guides dug into context engineering, egress lockdown, and secure agent infrastructure patterns for Kubernetes and edge. On the platform side, Azure Firewall explicit proxy went GA, Azure Arc shipped GA improvements for Arc-enabled Kubernetes certificates and Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid, and API Management advanced GitOps workflows plus preview spend controls and OTLP telemetry for AI gateways.

Cameron Tomisser shares a weekly Microsoft developer news roundup covering the Azure Developer CLI extension framework reaching GA, new CI/CD options to connect to Azure Cosmos DB without storing secrets, and progress on making agent security more production-ready.

John Savill runs through the Azure Weekly Update for 4th September 2026, covering a set of platform changes across compute, AKS, networking, monitoring, security, and Azure AI Foundry, with quick pointers to what’s new and where the updates land in the Azure stack.

Shayak Lahiri explains why Edge AI shifts security responsibility into customer-owned infrastructure, and outlines practical patterns for protecting model weights, credentials, and data. The post focuses on gating sensitive asset release using runtime attestation and artifact provenance, plus deterministic mediation to constrain what models can do.

Justin Bettencourt’s August 2026 Azure SDK roundup highlights new and updated client libraries across .NET, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, and more, including Document Translation 2.0.0, Azure Storage Blobs 12.30.0-beta.1, and the first stable release of Azure AI Discovery.

devanshirastogi rounds up five recent Azure Firewall capabilities—some now generally available and others in public preview—covering explicit proxy support, IPv6 dual-stack filtering, HTTP header insertion, auto-learned SNAT routes via Azure Route Server, and higher-throughput IDPS with TLS inspection for Azure Firewall Premium.

rgarofalo walks through a hands-on build that locks down Azure AI Foundry both inbound (Private Endpoint) and outbound (agent egress via network injection), including the DNS zones you must create, how to prove public access is actually blocked, and how to troubleshoot opaque agent tool-call failures like 424 errors.

Wes Steyn and Eduard van Valkenburg announce a preview integration that adds durable, cross-session memory to Microsoft Agent Framework agents using Azure Cosmos DB. They explain how the Cosmos-backed context provider participates in the agent lifecycle, and show a Python example that stores conversation turns, extracts memories in the background, and recalls them in later sessions.

sbaynes announces GPT-6 Astra rolling out via the Microsoft Foundry Limited Access Program, focusing on agentic, multi-step work (planning, tool use, and computer use across apps) and the enterprise controls needed to run it safely in production, including identity, networking, governance, and monitoring.

Christine Caggiano, Joshua Bradley, Steven Truitt, and William Chappell describe how Microsoft Discovery’s Discovery Engine adds CLIO (a self-adaptive “cognitive loop”) to improve agentic scientific problem-solving, and share benchmark results from Agent’s Last Exam showing higher scores and better consistency through multi-model, evidence-driven exploration.

Jeremy Winter argues that getting enterprise AI into production is less about picking a single model and more about running an end-to-end system on Azure—spanning infrastructure, data, governance, security, and operations. The post highlights Microsoft AI Foundry, Fabric, Purview, and Azure databases, plus modernization workflows that include GitHub Copilot.

wolfgangdesalvador introduces a public preview optimization for Azure Blob Storage List Blobs that returns results in Apache Arrow format, cutting response size and client parsing cost. The post explains the required REST headers and SDK versions, shows a Python decoding example, and shares rclone benchmarks demonstrating large speedups with parallel listing.

Steve Sweetman and Naomi Moneypenny announce general availability of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra in Microsoft Foundry, focusing on agentic, cross-application “computer use” and enterprise readiness. The post highlights deployment options (Standard vs Provisioned Throughput), Global vs US Data Zone availability, token-based pricing, and the security/governance controls used to run these workflows in production.

pranabpaul walks through the first part of building a retail assistant demo using Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Foundry, focusing on setting up the Azure environment, provisioning Fabric capacity, loading sample data into a Lakehouse, creating an ontology, and wiring a Fabric Data Agent to query that data.

pranabpaul continues the 3IQ Retail Assistant demo by wiring unstructured PDF content into an Azure AI Foundry agent using Azure Blob Storage and Azure AI Search, including the RBAC permissions needed for managed identities and the networking trade-offs involved when publishing the agent to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Mohammed Barqawi introduces Logic App Storage Inspector, a read-only Kudu site extension that helps troubleshoot Azure Logic Apps Standard by inspecting the underlying storage for workflow history, versions, and queue health, with guidance on installation, configuration settings, and managed identity permissions.

Bob Ward and Anna Hoffman discuss five lesser-known aspects of Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, focusing on what the “Hyperscale” tier really means, how its architecture differs from other tiers, and the practical implications for replicas, backups, and pricing.

Brent Halazon explains how Microsoft’s Physical Security Engineering Team used Azure Arc and Azure Virtual Desktop to standardize and scale hybrid operations across a global datacenter footprint, improving governance, observability, patching, and the operator experience without moving workloads fully into Azure.

Dalibor Kovacevic explains how to use Azure SRE Agent’s advanced ServiceNow filtering to route the right incidents to the right response plan, then control how much autonomy the responder has (Autonomous vs Review) while you preview and tune matching before enabling it.

dotnet covers the production-readiness pieces for an AI agent, focusing on observability with OpenTelemetry, governance and data protection with Microsoft Purview, and quality evaluation as the SDK evolves, then shows how to deploy the agent to Foundry Hosted Agents and maintain it with a refresh-prompt workflow.

dotnet demonstrates how to make an AI agent interact with real user data more safely by adding file access, explicit human approvals for sensitive actions, and durable memory that persists across restarts.

yairgil explains how the Azure Copilot Observability Agent can use Azure Monitor Log Analytics Basic and Auxiliary table plans as investigation evidence, helping teams reduce log costs while still correlating alerts, metrics, traces, topology, and recent changes during incident response—especially in high-volume AKS environments.

Microsoft Developer demonstrates building the “Sparkles” AI agent in VS Code using the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit, including deploying a model, wiring up an MCP server, and validating the agent with traces and evaluation runs for repeatable testing.

kinfey explains why “AI agent infrastructure” needs stronger security boundaries than traditional model hosting, using kars (an open-source Agent Reference Stack for Kubernetes) to show how to isolate agent runtimes, broker identity, govern tools/MCP, control egress, enforce token budgets, and produce auditable evidence for incident response.

Microsoft Security Research, Sagar Patil, Arlette Umuhire Sangwa, Jesse Birch and Ravikant Tiwari break down a hands-on-keyboard intrusion that starts with Microsoft Teams helpdesk impersonation, escalates through remote-control sessions and a malicious MSI, and ends with Node.js-based persistence and WinRM lateral movement, with concrete mitigations and Defender XDR hunting queries.

ryanjadams explains how to keep Fabric Data Factory pipelines and Copy Jobs fully private when moving data to or from Snowflake, using Workspace-level Private Link, a private Azure Storage staging account, and Snowflake’s Azure Private Link storage integration.

Jeff Hollan explains how “context engineering” in Microsoft Foundry can reduce enterprise AI agent costs without sacrificing quality, by tightening what goes into the context window each turn. The post breaks down practical levers—knowledge retrieval, tool selection, reusable procedures, and memory—plus governance controls like Entra ID and Purview.

devanshirastogi announces the general availability of explicit proxy in Azure Firewall, explaining how to steer selected HTTP/HTTPS traffic through a single proxy port for centralized inspection. The post highlights managed-identity access to PAC files in Azure Blob Storage, a streamlined portal workflow, and hybrid scenarios like securing Azure Arc connectivity over ExpressRoute or VPN.

budzynski summarizes the August 2026 updates to the AI Gateway tier (preview) of Azure API Management, focusing on improved OpenTelemetry-based observability for AI workloads and new controls for monitoring and enforcing model spend via budgets and cost-limit policies.

ChethanRaj outlines a practical way to design Azure access using RBAC and Managed Identities, with an emphasis on least-privilege permissions across people, applications, and deployment pipelines. The post highlights common design mistakes and how to avoid over-scoping access (for example, granting Contributor when only Key Vault secret read is needed).

ChethanRaj outlines the key trade-offs when designing Dev, UAT, Staging, and Production environment boundaries in Azure, focusing on when to separate by resource group versus subscription, how to place shared services, and how operational and security boundaries should drive the overall structure.

ChethanRaj outlines practical considerations for structuring Dev, UAT, Staging, and Production environments in Azure, focusing on when to separate by resource group vs subscription, where to place shared services, and how operational and security boundaries should drive the design.

wolfgangdesalvador breaks down Azure’s MLPerf Storage v3.0 results for Azure Managed Lustre, focusing on how sustained throughput and fast checkpoint I/O help keep large AI training clusters from stalling.

Alex-wdy explains an upcoming Azure Key Vault control plane API retirement and the required tooling upgrades to avoid breaking vault management operations. The post lists minimum Azure CLI and Az PowerShell versions, how to check what you have installed, and the exact upgrade commands to run before the February 27, 2027 deadline.

Sithu explains why long-running Azure Batch tasks on Ubuntu nodes can get interrupted and re-queued on a daily schedule, even when the app itself never fails. The post shows how to confirm the cause on a node and how to stop the restarts without breaking your pool operations.

gurjsing shows how to turn Microsoft’s published compliance scope (using Germany’s C5 as the example) into enforceable Azure controls by extracting the certified-service list from the Service Trust Portal, mapping it to ARM resource types, and deploying a deny/audit Azure Policy with a reviewable, automated workflow.

Amit Ganguli announces the public preview of the Resiliency Agent in Azure Copilot, which helps teams assess zonal resiliency across subscriptions, prioritize fixes with cost-aware indicators, and generate deployment-ready Bicep/Terraform templates and scripts to remediate gaps.