Browse Azure News (193)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shireesh Thota summarizes the main architecture trends from Cosmos DB Conf 2026, focusing on how teams are building AI-native apps on Azure Cosmos DB with flexible data models, serverless scale, and first-class semantic/vector search, plus practical patterns for agent memory, cost visibility, and multi-user security.

Kristen Womack introduces an Azure Developer CLI (azd) template from Curity and Microsoft that deploys an AI agent app to Azure with least-privilege authorization. It focuses on using short-lived OAuth 2.0 tokens (JWTs) and token exchange so APIs can enforce data boundaries even when agent behavior is nondeterministic.

Juan Montes reports on how Porsche Cup Brasil built an AI-assisted crash analysis and telemetry workflow on Microsoft platforms, cutting damage assessment time and improving race operations with human-in-the-loop validation.

Tao Chen and Shawn Henry explain how to take a Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) agent from local development to production by deploying it as a container to Foundry Hosted Agents, with built-in identity, scaling, session persistence, versioning, and observability.

Miquella de Boer announces general availability of a native OneLake catalog experience inside Azure AI Foundry, letting teams browse governed Fabric/OneLake data in-context and turn it into knowledge sources for grounded AI workflows without manually wiring data sources.

Shyju Krishnankutty shows how to build durable, multi-step AI agent workflows with the Microsoft Agent Framework: start with an in-process .NET console workflow, add durability via the Durable Task runtime and scheduler, then scale out with parallel agents and host the same workflow on Azure Functions.

Rob Lefferts summarizes KuppingerCole’s 2026 Emerging AI SOC report and explains how Microsoft is shifting SOC automation from playbook-driven SOAR toward intelligence-led, agent-assisted operations using Microsoft Sentinel, Defender XDR, and Security Copilot.

Jessica Hawk outlines how Microsoft is expanding Azure datacenter capacity across Europe and how that investment ties into running AI workloads while meeting data residency and sovereignty requirements. The post highlights regional growth, sovereign cloud options, and guidance for designing resilient multi-region architectures.

Mark Brown recaps Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026 with production lessons on why throughput problems are often data-model problems, how partition keys and query shape drive RU cost, and how features like hierarchical partition keys and Change Feed support scalable event-driven and AI memory workloads.

Allison announces the general availability of the Microsoft Defender for Cloud integration with GitHub Advanced Security, which correlates deployed container artifacts back to their source repositories and adds runtime risk context to help teams prioritize and remediate the most relevant security findings.

Jeremy Likness shows how the Microsoft Agent Framework (v1.0) builds on Microsoft.Extensions.AI to create autonomous, tool-using AI agents in .NET, including multi-turn sessions, memory via context providers, and graph-based workflows for orchestrating multiple agents.

Narayan Annamalai explains how Azure IaaS applies defense-in-depth and Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative principles to protect infrastructure across hardware, virtualization, networking, storage, and operations, with secure defaults and continuous monitoring built into the platform.

David Wright, Arnaud Lheureux, and Suzanne Daniels walk through using Git-Ape to migrate an AWS Terraform deployment repo to an Azure-native setup, generating Bicep and a GitHub Actions pipeline for deploying a Next.js app to Azure App Service with managed identity and built-in monitoring.

Kristen Womack summarizes the April 2026 Azure Developer CLI (azd) releases, focusing on multi-language hooks in azure.yaml, extension framework updates, Copilot-assisted troubleshooting, and a set of security, provisioning, and CI/CD reliability improvements across versions 1.23.14 through 1.24.2.

Mark Russinovich and Saurabh Dighe announce that Azure Integrated HSM—Microsoft’s server-integrated hardware security module—is being open-sourced via the Open Compute Project, including firmware and supporting software. The post explains how this extends Azure’s key protection from centralized services down to each server, with verifiable, hardware-enforced controls.

Luis Quintanilla walks through ConferencePulse, a Blazor Server app on .NET 10 that uses .NET’s composable AI stack—Microsoft.Extensions.AI, DataIngestion, VectorData, MCP, and Microsoft Agent Framework—to build RAG-based Q&A, AI-generated polls/insights, and a multi-agent session summary.

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.

HARMEETGILL announces a preview feature in Microsoft Fabric that lets workspace admins secure OneLake inbound access using Azure resource identities instead of IP allowlists, and explains how it works 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.