Browse Azure Community (320)

Shamir AbdulAziz lays out a practical operating model for “Zero Ops” using Azure SRE Agent: agents handle investigation and remediation work, while humans focus on intent, governance, and outcome review. The post breaks down how to scope agents, connect context, build repeatable artifacts, and safely graduate from human-in-the-loop to autonomy.

Mason Torres announces the general availability of Windows Server 2016 Extended Security Updates (ESUs) enabled by Azure Arc, explaining how to onboard servers, enroll in ESUs through the Azure portal or Azure Policy, and use Azure services like Update Manager and guest configuration to manage patching and compliance.

Jatin Garg explains how to choose between Microsoft Foundry and PyRIT for AI red teaming, framing the decision around whether you’re testing a model in a managed Foundry/Azure OpenAI surface or attacking a full RAG/agent application with custom endpoints and orchestration.

Dona Mukherjee announces a public preview of Confidential Virtual Machines on Azure Local, explaining how hardware-backed memory encryption and attestation can protect data-in-use on customer-managed edge infrastructure, including how Azure Attestation and Azure Key Vault enable secure key release for sensitive workloads.

EldertGrootenboer explains why some .NET Framework WCF Relay listeners start failing against Azure Relay after TLS 1.0/1.1 retirement, and outlines practical fixes ranging from app config changes to code updates and machine-wide registry settings.

amitmishra introduces the public preview of Azure Private Link over IPv6 and provides a practical setup guide for reaching Azure PaaS services via IPv6 private endpoints, including native Azure and on-premises connectivity over ExpressRoute, plus DNS and validation steps.

Lee Stott introduces Microsoft’s end-to-end agent platform (now GA) using the FibreOps reference implementation: build agents with the Microsoft Agent Framework and GitHub Copilot SDK, run them as hosted agents in Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, and distribute them to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, with evaluation, routines, memory, and observability.

WSilveira explains how the Logic Apps Standard extension for VS Code can use Managed Identity for connectors during local development, so the same connection setup works both on your machine and after deployment. The post covers required versions, the WORKFLOWS_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD setting, and connector-specific behavior and limitations.

Anshu Verma announces the general availability of Azure Virtual Network routing appliance and explains where it fits in large-scale Azure network designs, including hub-and-spoke growth, private connectivity patterns, IPv6/dual-stack adoption, and multi-region connectivity with Azure-native operations and monitoring.

kinfey explains how Kars (Agent Reference Stack for Kubernetes) runs long-lived, tool-using AI agents with a tight blast radius by making the pod the trust boundary, brokering identity and egress through an in-pod router, and enforcing content safety, token budgets, and tamper-evident auditing on AKS.

larohra explains how Azure Functions Agents now includes built-in OpenTelemetry tracing, so each agent run automatically appears as a structured trace in Application Insights. The post shows how to enable export with a single runtime extra and an App Setting, then uses Foundry Model Router as an example of making model selection visible.

jordanselig announces the public preview of Markdown for Agents in Azure App Service, a feature that converts HTML responses into Markdown to reduce noise and token usage for agent and LLM scenarios, with steps to enable it via REST, ARM/Bicep, or Azure CLI and to request Markdown using an HTTP header.

aimeelittleton explains a recommended Azure outbound networking design that pairs Azure Firewall with StandardV2 NAT Gateway to get centralized inspection plus scalable, zone-resilient SNAT with predictable egress IPs, and shows what’s changed in the Azure portal create flow to set this up faster.

farhakareem announces the beta of Azure Linux on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), aimed at reducing environment drift by letting developers use the same Microsoft-supported Linux base locally that’s used across Azure infrastructure, AKS, and container workloads.

Pamela Fox shares the materials from the “Microsoft IQ Deep Dive with Python” livestream series, showing how to ground AI apps and agents using Web IQ, Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ via MCP endpoints, plus code samples, slides, and write-ups for building and deploying Python agents.

shashankamalladi outlines updated scale limits for Azure Network Security Perimeter, including new hard limits for perimeters, profiles, rule elements, and associated PaaS resources, plus what changes apply to existing configurations through the 10/31/26 transition window.

nelsontam introduces Microsoft’s MARS (Map Autoregressive) model on Microsoft Foundry and explains how it converts satellite imagery into GIS-ready vector map data. The post outlines an end-to-end workflow with Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro, including STAC/COG ingestion requirements and practical deployment settings for running geospatial feature extraction at scale.

TomClaes explains how to govern Azure Log Analytics retention across many workspaces by keeping workspace defaults low, setting per-table interactive retention, and using long-term retention only where needed. The post includes an Azure Policy-based, DeployIfNotExists solution with auditing, drift detection, and automated remediation.

junjieli summarizes the July 2026 releases (1.6.3–1.6.6) of the Foundry Toolkit for VS Code, focusing on a flatter, tabbed workspace, inline tool wiring, deeper agent debugging via event-level inspection, and a new Agent Optimization preview that supports measured compare-and-deploy tuning for hosted agents.

Zoran Jovanovic breaks down the main regional distribution patterns for Azure workloads—single region, failover, parallel (active-active), segmented, and portable—framing each as a deliberate reliability and risk decision with clear trade-offs around cost, complexity, RTO/RPO, and service capabilities.

Abhishek Tiwari explains how Azure Front Door edge actions adds customer-defined logic in the request path while keeping hyperscale performance predictable, enforcing strong tenant isolation with Hyperlight micro-VMs, and building resiliency through bounded latency, fast-fail behavior, and validated fallback mechanisms.

kyleikeda explains an upcoming Azure Cost Management policy change: starting Feb. 1, 2027, reservation exchanges will no longer be available for services that are covered by Azure savings plans. The post lists affected services, clarifies what stays the same, and outlines practical steps to plan ahead.

Chris Noring shows how to build an AI shopping assistant that remembers customer preferences across sessions by plugging a SQL Server-backed history provider into Microsoft Agent Framework, then explains how the same setup can move from local Docker to Azure SQL Database (including Hyperscale) with only a connection-string change.

demiajayi introduces new Cost Management and Pricing toolsets for the Azure Resource Manager MCP server, enabling AI agents (including GitHub Copilot clients) to query costs, forecast spend, manage budgets and alerts, retrieve pricing, and analyze AKS costs directly through Azure’s control plane.

hetvip introduces a community template collection that lets teams keep their existing workflow orchestrator (like Airflow, Temporal, or Argo) while using Azure Container Apps Jobs as the execution layer for containerized tasks, including guidance on identity, RBAC, retries, and fan-out patterns.

Ilana Waitser announces a public preview that lets you share Azure Monitor Logs from a Log Analytics workspace into Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake as Delta Parquet, without duplicating data. The post explains what this enables in Fabric—Power BI reporting, Spark-based analytics and ML, and correlating telemetry with business data for near real-time decisions.

stevenjma announces the general availability of Terraform AzureRM provider 5.0 and explains the key breaking changes, including new defaults for Resource Provider registration, opt-in Azure preflight validation during terraform plan, and removal of deprecated resources and properties.

Aurnov Chattopadhyay recaps the June 2026 Azure Arc Server Forum, including updates on the Arc Server AI Agent, Azure Arc Multicloud Connector previews (GCP connector and EKS cluster enablement), and ESU guidance for Windows Server 2016/2012 and SQL Server 2016 end-of-support timelines.

Lee Stott walks through an end-to-end, production-minded approach for taking a multi-agent system from local development into Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, then distributing it to users in Microsoft Teams. The guide focuses on identity, governance, observability, and repeatable deployment using the FibreOps reference implementation.

pallakatos announces GA support for built-in CIS Benchmark auditing for Linux workloads using Azure Policy with Machine Configuration, including Azure Arc-enabled servers. The post outlines what’s included in GA, which Linux distributions and CIS benchmark versions are supported, and the basic steps to enable continuous compliance reporting in Azure.

Rafia Aqil outlines how to enable Azure Databricks’ Compliance Security Profile (CSP) for HIPAA workloads, including the September 1, 2026 deadline, required prerequisites like Azure VNet encryption and supported VM series, and a rollout approach to validate cluster startup and end-to-end connectivity before production.

stevenbucher introduces a new Compliance Substate property for Azure Policy exemptions, making it possible to see whether exempt resources would be compliant or non-compliant if the exemption were removed. The post shows where to enable the column in the Azure portal and how to query the field at scale using Azure Resource Graph.

prateekwrites explains why “cost per token” is a misleading metric for agentic systems, and proposes “cost per accepted task” as the unit that matters. The post maps this idea to an Azure reference architecture using APIM’s GenAI gateway, Azure AI Foundry evaluations, and a policy loop driven by telemetry and alerts.

Nora Zhan introduces “Physical-World Intelligence” and explains how GeoAI combines geospatial data (weather, satellite imagery, sensors, and maps) with enterprise context and AI. The article outlines Microsoft Foundry’s geospatial model catalog, Planetary Computer Pro as a GeoAI data plane, and a GeoAI SDK for production-scale inference workflows.

tonimontez explains how to govern GitHub Copilot’s usage-based spend using GitHub’s native budget controls first, then adds an Azure API Management gateway in front of an Azure AI Foundry (Azure OpenAI) deployment for real-time, token-granular quotas and per-developer telemetry.

vladvino announces the public preview of the AI Gateway tier for Azure API Management, focused on publishing and governing AI models and MCP servers. The post explains the new portal experience, policy-card governance (rate limits, quotas, Content Safety, fallback), and OpenTelemetry token metrics to destinations like Application Insights.

Kumar Kaushal demonstrates a transitional Azure networking pattern for phased migrations where an application is hard-coded to a legacy private IP. The lab uses Private Link Service Direct Connect plus a Private Endpoint and a site-to-site VPN so Azure-hosted tiers can keep calling the same on-premises address during the interim phase.

Lee Stott explains why the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is becoming the standard way AI agents connect to tools and data, then shows minimal runnable MCP server examples in Python and TypeScript plus practical guidance for VS Code hosting, security, and production operations.

AbodeSaafan explains how the Azure Logic Apps team migrated roughly 60,000 per-customer Azure Functions apps from the end-of-life v1/v2 runtime to Functions v4 (isolated worker) under live load, using shadow traffic, strict parity checks, and a progressive rollout with fast rollback and careful retirement of the old fleet.

stevenbucher explains how Azure Policy for Kubernetes can now enforce policies using Kubernetes Validating Admission Policy (VAP) with CEL, via Gatekeeper’s integration. The post contrasts the older webhook/Rego flow with in-process validation, then walks through packaging a CEL constraint template into an Azure Policy definition and rolling it out across AKS clusters.