Browse All Azure Content (646)

Patty Chow shares real-world Azure Cosmos DB Conf stories about teams using Azure Cosmos DB as an operational backbone, including one case where a single database replaced four systems, reduced costs by 73%, and cut latency by 65%.

Patty Chow recaps an Azure Cosmos DB Conf story where a team reduced Cosmos DB costs by 60% while eliminating throttling and dramatically improving P99 latency, focusing on design choices like RU/s tuning, partition keys, indexing, and query patterns.

Patty Chow uses a “two people, one seat” scenario to highlight why concurrency bugs show up in real systems, then points to Azure Cosmos DB patterns—like multi-region writes, conflict resolution, change feed, event sourcing, and replay/replayable architectures—to design for issues you can’t easily simulate.

Patty Chow explains what it takes to move an AI agent beyond a demo, focusing on “memory” as an architecture decision that affects cost, recall quality, and user experience, and demonstrating an MCP server running inside GitHub Copilot backed by Azure Cosmos DB.

rbhatia explains how Azure Application Gateway’s Layer 4 TCP/TLS proxy can centralize ingress for non-HTTP workloads, including legacy TCP protocols and Kubernetes-hosted TCP services. The post covers TCP/TLS listeners, TLS pass-through, Proxy Protocol v1 for preserving client connection details, and practical recommendations for production deployments.

Imran Siddique and Shawn Henry explain how Microsoft Agent Framework and the Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT) fit together to run AI agents safely in production, with deterministic runtime policy checks, budget enforcement, and end-to-end auditability across local and cross-boundary (A2A) agent interactions.

Anna Hoffman explains what SQL Server 2016 end of support in July 2026 means, outlines customer options (including Extended Security Updates), and walks through Microsoft’s zero-cost Cloud Accelerate Factory offering to help teams migrate or modernize onto Azure SQL or newer SQL Server versions.

Ronnie Geraghty announces the GA (stable) release of the Azure SDK for Rust, covering the now-stable core, identity, Key Vault, and Storage crates. The post highlights API stability and semver guarantees, improved paging and long-running operations primitives, built-in resilience, and OpenTelemetry-based observability, with a quickstart example for authenticating and listing blobs.

RoaaSakr explains how AKS Pod Sandboxing startup time for large-memory pods improved dramatically after Azure Linux kernel changes for Microsoft Hypervisor (MSHV), shifting from eager memory allocation to deferred page allocation and making sandbox VM boot time largely independent of requested memory size.

Jim Harrer announces the VSLive! Microsoft AI Hackathon 2026 at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, a hands-on evening build event designed to help teams ship real prototypes using Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, GitHub Copilot, and agent-based patterns, with judging criteria that emphasize architecture, security, and practical value.

stclarke summarizes SAP Sapphire 2026 announcements focused on running SAP workloads on Azure and moving enterprise AI from pilots to production, including Azure OpenAI + Copilot Studio scenarios, Microsoft Fabric connectivity to SAP data, sovereign cloud options for regulated industries, and Sentinel-based monitoring for SAP landscapes.

Microsoft Defender Security Research Team and Yossi Weizman break down real-world “exploitable misconfigurations” in cloud-native AI apps—especially Kubernetes deployments where exposed services and weak auth can lead to RCE, credential theft, and data leaks—and show what to harden and what Defender for Cloud can detect.

SurenderSinghMalik breaks down recent Azure App Service (Linux) changes that make Python deployments faster and more reliable for AI-heavy workloads, including new compression and packaging defaults, fewer expensive file operations, and client-side improvements that reduce transient deployment failures.

EfratNauerman announces a public preview update for the Azure Copilot Observability Agent in Azure Monitor, focused on using chat-driven investigations and exploration to speed up triage and root-cause analysis across logs, metrics, traces, and alerts in distributed systems.

vikas_gautam describes an end-to-end architecture for bringing Databricks Genie into Microsoft Teams using an Azure AI Foundry agent, focusing on what breaks in private, regulated environments and how to handle networking isolation, multi-hop identity, and per-user authorization when querying governed data.

TulikaC introduces Platform Release Channel for Azure App Service for Linux, a setting that lets teams control how quickly runtime patch updates are applied so they can balance security updates with validation time in production.

Michael Flanakin summarizes FinOps toolkit 14, including a Copilot Studio agent template for querying FinOps hub data with KQL, a new recommendations pipeline that ingests Azure Advisor and Resource Graph results, a simplified hub deployment UI, and a preview dataset for commitment discount eligibility.

Bruno Capuano and Jose Luis Latorre preview what to watch for at Microsoft Build 2026 around .NET and AI, including agentic patterns, copilots, and expected updates across the Microsoft developer ecosystem.

RavinderGupta outlines a “self-healing” CI/CD pattern where an agent observes Azure DevOps pipeline failures, uses Azure OpenAI (via Microsoft AI Foundry) to analyze build logs, and then proposes or applies fixes—such as updating Terraform for Azure Internal Load Balancer configuration—by opening a pull request for review.

simranparkhe announces general availability of Azure Integrated HSM for select AMD v7 Trusted Launch VM sizes, explaining how it caches keys and offloads cryptographic operations locally to reduce Key Vault round-trips while keeping key material inside a FIPS 140-3 Level 3 hardware boundary.

Ayan Gupta demonstrates how the GitHub Copilot app modernization extension containerizes a Java 21 application with Docker, validates it locally, and then provisions Azure infrastructure and deploys to Azure Container Apps using built-in tasks and an agent-driven workflow.

simonjj announces Azure Container Apps Express (public preview), a new way to deploy a container image as an internet-reachable app on Azure with pre-provisioned capacity, fast provisioning, sub-second cold starts, and built-in production defaults like ingress, secrets, and observability.

syedarshad walks through a practical workflow for testing AI agents with LangSmith, using Azure OpenAI as the target model. The guide shows how to build an evaluation dataset, run LLM-as-judge scoring (correctness and hallucination checks), and interpret per-example and aggregate results with tracing and experiment views.

NandiniMuralidharan shows how to connect browser-harness to Playwright Workspaces so an AI coding agent can drive a real, cloud-hosted Chromium browser over CDP, enabling parallel, isolated sessions for tasks like scraping and interacting with JavaScript-heavy sites.

Max Uritsky announces general availability of a new Azure Boost hardware platform underpinning Esv7, Dsv7, and Dlsv7 VMs, detailing the PCIe card architecture (ASIC/FPGA, MANA NIC, Arm SoC), the performance gains for networking and storage, and the security model built around hardware root of trust and continuous attestation.

stclarke summarizes Microsoft and Red Hat’s Red Hat Summit 2026 updates for Azure Red Hat OpenShift, focusing on running modern apps and production AI with enterprise governance. It highlights OpenShift Virtualization for VM-to-Kubernetes migration, identity and confidential computing features, GPU-backed AI workloads, and expanded regional availability.

Connected-Seth explains how Azure Event Grid MQTT Broker supports common IoT messaging patterns and highlights four features—retain messages, shared subscriptions, HTTP publish, and subscription identifiers—that reduce client complexity and make it easier to scale device telemetry and command workflows.

Jingwei Wang introduces “Open in VS Code” from Azure Copilot in the Azure Portal, a guided workflow that takes AI-generated Terraform configurations into an Azure-hosted VS Code environment so teams can validate, configure state backends, and deploy to Azure with fewer handoffs.

Matt Basile introduces OneLake storage tiers and lifecycle management in Microsoft Fabric (preview), explaining how admins can reduce long-term storage costs by automatically moving files between hot, cool, and cold tiers while accounting for the trade-off of higher transaction, retrieval, and capacity (CU) costs.

Kumar Srinivasamurthy outlines how modern DDoS campaigns have shifted toward multi-vector and application-layer abuse, and shares a defense-in-depth approach for keeping consumer-facing services usable under sustained attack, including edge filtering, resilient architecture, and planned graceful degradation.

kinfey explains why AI agents running model-generated code need stronger isolation than standard containers, then walks through deploying a GitHub Copilot SDK agent on AKS using Kata Containers (kata-vm-isolation) plus layered hardening like seccomp, NetworkPolicy egress allowlists, and deny-by-default tool permissions.

Nick Brady’s April 2026 digest covers Microsoft Foundry updates for model access, local inference, agent observability, and SDK changes across Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET, and Java, with concrete guidance on quota tiers, tracing via OpenTelemetry, and monitoring/evaluation features for production agents.

vikas_gautam introduces PII Shield, a privacy proxy that sits in front of LLM calls to detect and anonymize PII (with optional reversal) so raw identifiers don’t leak through prompts, gateways, logs, or observability pipelines.

vyomnagrani explains why Microsoft built Azure AI Foundry Agent Service on Azure Container Apps, focusing on what changes when AI agents move from prototypes to production: bursty execution, long-running workflows, secure tool execution, isolation, state persistence, and the operational requirements for running agent fleets reliably at scale.

mohit-kanojia explains what AKS Arc is and how Azure Arc extends Azure’s control plane to run and manage Kubernetes on-premises, at the edge, and in multicloud. The post covers core components (Arc agents, custom locations, logical networks), a CLI-driven deployment flow, and practical networking and troubleshooting guidance.

FaizaanMerchant explains a Zero Trust network design for Azure Databricks that avoids public workspace exposure by fronting external access with Azure Application Gateway WAF and routing traffic to the workspace through Private Endpoints, while keeping internal access on private connectivity (VPN/ExpressRoute).

grace_kim explains a Windows Kerberos hardening change rolling out from April–July 2026 that can break Kerberos-based SMB access to Azure Files when AD DS objects are still using (or defaulting to) RC4. The post shows how to detect impacted configurations and migrate to AES-256 before rollback is removed after July 2026.

Alex-wdy explains why Azure CLI on macOS is moving away from Homebrew Core and introducing new Preview installation options in Azure CLI 2.86.0, including a Homebrew Cask package and an offline tarball for restricted environments, with a focus on signed, notarized binaries and future enterprise authentication needs.

osmancokakoglu announces the winners of the AI Dev Days Hackathon and summarizes the projects and the Microsoft stack they used, including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI models, and the Microsoft Agent Framework, plus common Azure services and DevOps practices used to ship production-grade agentic apps.

EldertGrootenboer announces the general availability of confidential computing for Azure Service Bus Premium, explaining how TEEs protect message data while it’s being processed and how it complements existing encryption and network controls. The post also covers regional availability and how to enable the feature in the portal or via templates.