Browse Azure News (204)

Jason Helmick announces the GA release of Microsoft Desired State Configuration (DSC) v3.2.0, covering new built-in Windows resources, experimental Bicep orchestration over gRPC, expanded WhatIf support, version pinning, expression language updates, and adapter/extension improvements, plus install and support lifecycle details.

Swapnil Nagar explains how Azure Functions can settle Azure Service Bus messages individually when processing batches, so one failing message doesn’t force the whole batch to retry. The post covers complete/abandon/dead-letter/defer actions and shows working examples in TypeScript, Python, and .NET isolated worker.

Jared Meade builds a .NET 10 console app that demonstrates tiered caching using HybridCache: an in-memory layer plus a distributed cache stored in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The walkthrough covers generic host setup, configuration and secrets, wiring the Postgres cache provider, and benchmarking latency improvements with cache hits vs misses.

Microsoft Defender Security Research Team explains how Microsoft Sentinel UEBA enriches AWS CloudTrail logs with simple true/false behavioral signals and built-in anomalies, helping detection engineers write simpler KQL, reduce false positives, and triage suspicious AWS activity faster.

Vlad Fedorov shares what GitHub is changing after two recent availability incidents, including scaling work driven by rapid growth in pull requests and API usage, plus concrete reliability efforts like service isolation, caching improvements, and continued migration to Azure and a future multi-cloud posture.

stclarke announces that Azure Local can now scale to thousands of servers in a single sovereign environment, aimed at regulated and mission-critical workloads. The post highlights disconnected operations, local policy/RBAC/auditing controls, and hardware options (validated compute/storage, GPUs) for running data-intensive workloads within a sovereign boundary.

stclarke shares a LinkedIn post about Cricket Australia’s Live app, highlighting how Azure OpenAI and Azure Cosmos DB power “AI Insights” that let fans explore match context, player stats, and cricket history with fast, personalized responses.

Victor Colin Amador announces that Azure MCP Server can now be installed as an MCP Bundle (.mcpb), enabling a one-click, no-runtime setup in Claude Desktop and other MCP clients, plus a quick walkthrough of installation, Azure authentication, and what Azure tools become available after setup.

Wes Steyn breaks down the main chat history storage patterns for AI agents—service-managed vs client-managed—and explains how Microsoft Agent Framework uses AgentSession and pluggable history providers to switch between providers (including Azure OpenAI and Foundry) without rewriting your agent code.

Josef Sin explains what the Axios npm supply chain compromise means for Azure Pipelines users, who is and isn’t impacted, and what to do if your CI/CD runs may have installed the malicious versions—covering agent types, service connections, cache cleanup, and practical mitigation steps.

Naomi Moneypenny announces GPT-5.5 general availability in Microsoft Foundry and explains what’s new (agentic coding, long-context reasoning, token efficiency) plus how Foundry Agent Service helps run hosted agents with isolation, Entra identity, and governance for production use.

Microsoft Fabric Blog announces a preview feature for OneLake: resource instance rules, which let Fabric workspace admins allow inbound access from specific Azure resource identities (ARM IDs) instead of relying on IP allowlists, while still working alongside Private Link and IP firewall rules.

stclarke covers how Cricket Australia added an AI Insights feature to its Cricket Australia Live app, using Azure OpenAI Service (GPT-5 in Microsoft Foundry) plus Azure as the cloud foundation to generate real-time, match-aware context and let fans ask follow-up questions during live play.

Kristen Womack announces multi-language hook support in the Azure Developer CLI (azd), so you can run lifecycle scripts in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or .NET (not just Bash/PowerShell). The post shows how to configure hooks in azure.yaml, how azd resolves dependencies per language, and how to override execution settings.

Linda Li, Maria Naggaga, and Ronak Chokshi introduce Toolboxes in Azure AI Foundry (public preview), a way to centrally curate and govern tool integrations and expose them via a single MCP-compatible endpoint so different agent runtimes can reuse the same tools without per-agent wiring.

Takuto Higuchi and jeffhollan outline an end-to-end path for building production AI agents with Microsoft Agent Framework v1.0 and Azure AI Foundry: local dev in VS Code, multi-agent composition, managed memory, tool access, hosted runtime, and observability (tracing, evaluations, red teaming) through to publishing in Teams/Microsoft 365.

Takuto Higuchi, Jeff Hollan, and Lakshmi Ramakrishnan announce Hosted Agents in Foundry Agent Service (public preview), a production-oriented runtime for AI agents with per-session VM isolation, persistent filesystem state across scale-to-zero, integrated identity (OBO), VNet egress control, and built-in observability.

Aseem Datar announces expanded preview access for Microsoft Discovery, an Azure-based agentic AI platform for R&D. The post explains how Discovery combines agent orchestration, graph-based knowledge, and HPC to run iterative “discovery loops,” and shares early customer examples in materials science, oncology research, engineering simulation, and chip design.

Nikola Zagorac explains how SQL Server 2025/Azure SQL Change Event Streaming (CES) can push row-level change events (in CloudEvents JSON) directly into Microsoft Fabric Eventstream via an Event Hubs–compatible custom endpoint, enabling near-real-time analytics and downstream routing in Fabric Real-Time Intelligence.

Jesse Sullivan introduces Azure Accelerate for Databases, a Microsoft Azure offering that combines delivery support, partner expertise, savings options, and skilling to help organizations modernize database estates and get data foundations ready for AI workloads.