Browse All Azure Content (472)

Sharon Xu announces Foundry Dev Pack, an all-in-one installer that sets up a Microsoft Foundry development environment across the terminal, VS Code, and coding agents, including Azure CLI/azd tooling and starter workflows for creating hosted agents.

stevenbucher announces public preview support for versioning custom Azure Policy definitions and initiatives, including how to create new versions, pin assignments to major/minor versions, and validate which version is effective via REST API, portal, CLI, and PowerShell.

Nivas Narayanasamy lays out a practical architecture for making private Azure VMware Solution workloads reachable by Azure AI Foundry agents without moving data. The post shows how to use MCP “bridge” servers on VNet-integrated Azure Container Apps, with ExpressRoute, private endpoints, Entra managed identity, and Key Vault-backed secrets to keep access private and read-only.

Mayuri Gupta announces the public preview of Azure Red Hat OpenShift hosted control planes, explaining how the control plane can run as a Microsoft-managed service while worker nodes stay in the customer subscription. The post covers operational benefits, Azure integrations (identity, monitoring, IaC), security controls, supported regions, and preview pricing.

Justin Yoo walks through a sample “Interview Coach” app that uses the GitHub Copilot SDK as an agent runtime (outside the editor) to run an interview workflow: ingest a resume, ask behavioral/technical questions, store session context, and generate end-of-interview feedback using MCP tools and Agent Framework handoffs.

Microsoft Developer shows how to use GitHub Copilot with a Microsoft Foundry skill to review and refactor an existing “Sparkle Cupcakes” agent, aligning it with current Foundry patterns and SDK guidance while improving production readiness.

Satoshi Kubota proposes using a Data Center WordCode Layer (DCWL)—a fixed-length 32-bit word encoding originally aimed at Azure text-processing workloads—to speed up Copilot for Windows and other Windows client text-heavy pipelines such as local RAG, semantic search, and log analysis.

Pieter Vandenheede explains how to decide whether to keep BizTalk after Microsoft confirmed BizTalk Server 2020 is the final release, and what conditions make “staying” a deliberate (and limited) choice. He also outlines practical signals that it’s time to move and frames the shift from “if we migrate” to “how we migrate safely.”

Thomas Maurer explains how Adaptive Apps and the open-source Radius control plane help teams engineer, test, and prove application portability across Azure, Azure Local, and other Kubernetes environments by separating app intent from environment-specific implementations.

nzthiago explains the new GA support for site-scoped certificates and end-to-end TLS in Azure Functions Flex Consumption, including certificate sources (Key Vault, managed certs, uploads), how to expose certs to code on Linux workers, and how to implement inbound and outbound mutual TLS safely.

Wuyi Weng explains how Azure SRE Agent can use an Azure Managed Grafana dashboard (via the MCP endpoint) as executable context to investigate GitHub Copilot telemetry in Application Insights, turning panel queries, variables, and descriptions into fast, accurate triage and per-session diagnoses.

Gaurav Bhardwaj walks through a practical “refund agent” example to show why AI agent observability needs more than green HTTP checks, and how to use Microsoft Foundry plus Azure Monitor (Application Insights and Log Analytics) to trace runs, evaluate tool-call correctness, set alerts, and bake in security and privacy controls.

Pieter Vandenheede breaks down Microsoft’s BizTalk Server lifecycle update, what stays supported through 2028/2030, and why “support isn’t strategy” for long-term integration platforms. He outlines practical next steps: inventorying your integration landscape, planning timelines, and evaluating Azure Integration Services (including Logic Apps) as the direction Microsoft is investing in.

This week's Azure roundup focuses on turning enterprise AI from pilots into repeatable platform work. Microsoft sharpened the recommended path: start with Azure landing zones for identity, networking, and policy, then use Microsoft Foundry to operationalize agents and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with consistent guardrails. Governance and cost control are treated as day-2 requirements, with token limits, rate controls, and Azure API Management's AI Gateway highlighted as practical enforcement points. If you are building internal copilots, the guidance reads like a deployment checklist for standard auth (Microsoft Entra ID), telemetry (Azure Monitor), and spend attribution you can tie back to outcomes.

kedikala lays out a practical security framework for agentic apps on Azure, focusing on how to keep tool calls safe when untrusted content can steer an agent toward sensitive reads or risky writes. The post breaks controls down across identity, retrieval, request validation, execution constraints, and outcome verification.

Wiliam_Rosa breaks down how Spark Structured Streaming’s Real-time mode (as implemented in Azure Databricks) can cut anomaly-detection latency from seconds to sub-millisecond, using an Ethereum transaction pipeline that classifies events as ALLOW or QUARANTINE based on protocol invariants and sensitive-payload checks.

jordanselig explains a new public preview capability in Azure Managed Connectors: sending trigger events directly to Azure App Service apps. The post covers how the App Service destination is configured, how managed-identity callbacks are authenticated with App Service built-in auth (Easy Auth), and includes an end-to-end sample with Bicep and Azure Developer CLI.

John Savill shares a quick Azure Weekly Update covering recent platform changes and previews, including VM ephemeral OS disk caching, Azure Functions Flex Consumption custom TLS, user delegation SAS updates, AZD extension framework work, Azure Load Testing Playwright expansion, and new Copilot-related items.

Visual Studio Code shows how to connect your own Azure-hosted AI models to GitHub Copilot in VS Code using Bring Your Own Key (BYOK), so teams can control which models are available in Copilot and pick the right model for different coding tasks.

Rohon Mohapatra explains how the Citadel reference architecture builds on AI landing zones and Microsoft Foundry to standardize enterprise AI operations—covering shared access controls, observability, identity, and security governance across multiple teams and workloads.

KimVaddi explains why many oil & gas AI initiatives stall on inconsistent business meaning rather than data volume, and argues that the “meaning layer” is the real readiness bottleneck. The post connects OSDU, Azure Data Manager for Energy, and Microsoft Fabric IQ’s preview ontology capability as a practical path to governed, cross-domain reasoning.

Brendan Burns explains why Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management, and uses the announcement to outline how AKS, Azure Container Apps, Azure Arc, and Fleet Manager are positioned for AI, hybrid, and edge container operations at scale.

Rena Liu announces Azure AI Speech LLM 2607 and explains what changes for developers building speech-to-text and real-time voice experiences, including better multilingual and mixed-language recognition, improved punctuation and numeric transcription, lower latency, and a simpler phrase list parameter for domain-specific customization.

Steve Sweetman explains how to govern AI agent spend in Microsoft Foundry by combining request-path token limits, observability (traces, monitoring, evaluations), and finance-grade budgets, then tying those signals to ROI so teams can decide what to optimize, scale, or retire.

Microsoft Developer introduces the Azure SQL Database Foundations series, positioning it as an entry point for learning core concepts around Azure SQL Database and how it fits into building and running cloud-hosted relational databases on Azure.

mnshnth announces that workload orchestration for Azure Arc is now available in the Azure portal, focusing on a portal-first onboarding flow that lets teams deploy a pre-packaged app to an Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster in minutes and then scale the same approach across distributed sites.

Microsoft Developer covers automatic index compaction (public preview) and how it can reduce or eliminate traditional index maintenance work for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL database in Microsoft Fabric.

Maria Bledsoe outlines how Azure IaaS resiliency is shifting from one-time DR planning to continuous design-and-operations practices, highlighting new and updated Azure capabilities for assessing resiliency posture, reducing blast radius during failures, and validating recovery readiness.

kchoi announces a public preview feature in Azure Arc Site Manager that centralizes monitoring and management of Azure Local workloads across multiple sites, including Azure Local virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters, with bulk actions plus grouping, filtering, and search to speed up day-to-day operations.

AzureAndrewChen announces the general availability of Dell Managed PowerScale for Microsoft Azure, a Dell-operated managed file storage service that can be provisioned and managed through Azure-native interfaces. The post highlights supported protocols, scale limits, and how the service integrates with Azure networking and Blob Storage tiering.

Juan Montes profiles Kinaxis’ Maestro platform and how it uses Azure (including AKS, Databricks, Azure OpenAI, Cosmos DB, and Azure AI Content Safety) to run large-scale supply chain scenario modeling, forecasting, and agentic AI experiences. The piece also touches on Kinaxis’ internal use of GitHub Copilot for an agentic, PR-driven development workflow.

Thomas Maurer introduces the new digital sovereignty adoption guidance in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, explaining the sovereign cloud continuum and a practical three-phase path (planning, architecture/governance, and operations) for building and running controlled Azure workloads across public, private, and partner cloud models.

Microsoft Developer introduces Toolboxes in Microsoft Foundry as a way to make MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations more enterprise-ready, with centralized governance, consistent authentication, and reusable configuration across multiple agents and tools.

Jakub Oleksy’s August 2026 GitHub availability report breaks down five production incidents across GitHub Actions, authentication, and Copilot services, including what failed, how GitHub mitigated impact, and what reliability work is planned next (capacity, autoscaling, retries, and regional failover).

Nick Brady rounds up July and August 2026 updates for Microsoft Foundry, including GA for Hosted Agents, Voice Live integration, and Toolboxes, plus Model Router pool/region changes and new model releases. It also calls out SDK migrations (Python/JS/Java/.NET) and runtime requirement bumps you should test before upgrading.

HilaryWang announces a public preview feature for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets that lets Azure automatically choose availability zones based on SKU availability, capacity signals, and your placement constraints, reducing the need to maintain region-specific zone lists for multi-region zonal deployments.

Microsoft Security Research and Lior Leizerovich introduce the Cloud Web Applications Threat Matrix, a MITRE ATT&CK-aligned framework for understanding and prioritizing threats against cloud-hosted web apps and serverless platforms, with practical examples spanning identities, deployment pipelines, managed runtimes, and connected cloud resources.

ellievail announces general availability of user-bound user delegation SAS for Azure Storage, which restricts a user delegation SAS token so it can only be used by a specific Microsoft Entra ID identity. The post explains how it works with RBAC, cross-tenant scenarios, and how to generate and share tokens safely.

Microsoft Developer demonstrates how to build a no-code AI agent in the Azure AI Foundry Portal: create a Foundry project, deploy a model, connect an MCP server for a cupcake store scenario, then validate the agent using tracing, token usage metrics, and evaluations.

Sudha Mahajan explains how Azure Migrate Network Planning adds network-aware discovery and assessment to VMware lift-and-shift migrations, helping teams capture dependencies, translate source constructs into Azure networking recommendations, surface readiness issues, and include network costs and security intent in the migration business case.