Browse Azure News (128)

Tsuyoshi Ushio introduces Dynamic Workflows for Azure Functions Hosted Skills, a preview feature that lets an LLM generate a typed DAG plan once and then run it durably via Durable Functions. The post explains the runtime model, safety checks, and when this approach reduces token usage and latency for event-driven apps.

Chu Lahlou compares Azure Document Intelligence (ADI) and Azure Content Understanding (ACU) for real-world document processing, focusing on when to use purpose-trained document models versus generative, schema-driven extraction. The guide covers OCR/layout overlap, custom extraction trade-offs, RAG-ready output, multimodal analysis, and a practical evaluation checklist.

Rani Borkar explains how Microsoft applies agentic AI across Azure’s hardware and infrastructure lifecycle—from demand planning and supply chain through datacenter fleet operations—to shorten decision cycles, improve reliability, and build a closed-loop learning system that keeps human judgment in control.

Brian Celenza explains how GitHub is redesigning its Git storage architecture to handle “agentic” development at extreme scale, where pushes, merges, and CI fan-out happen concurrently and continuously. The post outlines the bottlenecks in today’s replica-based design and the principles behind a new storage/compute split.

Alex Weininger introduces the Canvas authoring plugin, which guides GitHub Copilot through the native create-canvas workflow to generate an Azure canvas app based on Microsoft Canvas Toolkit, including a read-only starter and patterns for safe, explicitly scoped Azure operations.

Freddy Dezeure and Sesha Mani explain how frontier AI models are changing vulnerability management, and what CISOs can do to keep patching both fast and correct. The post highlights Microsoft’s use of AI “harnesses” for scanning and triage, and points to Baseline Security Mode and secure-by-default controls to reduce blast radius when patches can’t land in time.

Victoria Hall introduces Azure Functions Agent bindings (preview) for Python, showing how to add bounded agentic reasoning via Microsoft Agent Framework while keeping deterministic function code in control. The post walks through project structure, package setup, local settings, and examples for both direct HTTP calls and Durable Functions orchestrations.

James Rempt explains how Azure credits included with eligible Visual Studio Subscriptions can be used as a personal Azure sandbox for learning and experimentation, including how the monthly credit works, what happens when you hit the spending limit, and key constraints around non-production use and service eligibility.

Lily Ma introduces Azure Functions managed connectors (public preview) and shows how connector triggers and typed clients let functions react to events and call actions across services like SharePoint and Teams without hand-rolling webhook registration or OAuth token handling.

Allison rounds up the latest GitHub Copilot updates for the week, including new model options, HydraFusion model coordination in preview, reusable dynamic workflows, and “computer use” for automating desktop apps. The post also highlights new Azure canvases in the Copilot app and experimental VS Code agent improvements.

Kristen Womack recaps the September 2026 Azure Developer CLI (azd) releases, covering extension dependency handling, versioned gRPC extension contracts, new azure.yaml project layering, per-phase concurrency controls for provisioning and deployment, and authentication host connectivity via local socket transports.

Chu Lahlou and Cha Zhang explain why enterprise GenAI systems still need a dedicated content-extraction layer, even with stronger LLMs. They break down the operational gaps of “LLM-only” extraction and position Azure Document Intelligence and Azure Content Understanding as complementary tools for grounded, auditable, multimodal workflows.

Justin Bettencourt rounds up the September 2026 Azure SDK releases across .NET, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, and C++, calling out notable updates like Azure AI Search preview API support, a stable Rust SAS crate, and new Entra ID authentication libraries for PostgreSQL.

Matt Hernandez introduces Azure Canvases for GitHub Copilot, a shared workspace that pairs Copilot chat with interactive dashboards and guided workflows for common Azure tasks like deploying Functions, querying resources across subscriptions, and reviewing cost and governance signals.

Raj Pochiraju announces general availability of SQL Server on Azure Local for both connected and disconnected environments, aimed at sovereign, regulated, and edge scenarios. The post explains deployment options with Azure Arc management, and how Foundry Local can run AI inference next to SQL Server while keeping data and processing on-premises.

Fernando de Oliveira, Fernanda Lasmar, and Denise Mignoli explain how to package and distribute shared AI-assisted engineering workflows using GitHub Copilot plugins, so teams can reuse agent instructions, skills, and MCP tool connections while still keeping application-specific context and decisions inside each repo.

Mark Downie outlines the September Visual Studio update, including Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) for Copilot-powered agent mode, one-click fixes for NuGet Audit vulnerability warnings from the Error List, a Git agent for pull request exploration, improved C# debugging hints for compound if conditions, and Podman container attach support.

Microsoft Defender Experts Cybersecurity Incident Response (DART) breaks down how threat actor Storm-3068 used a compromised identity to pivot into Azure DevOps, tamper with trusted pipelines, and harvest Kubernetes credentials, plus practical steps to harden identity controls and DevOps pipelines against similar attacks.

shireesht summarizes FabCon EU and SQLCon 2026 announcements across Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft SQL, including Fabric Apps for building governed data-backed apps, Database Hub for centralized estate management, and preview “database agents” plus Azure SQL updates like DiskANN vector indexing for RAG scenarios.

murray-kp rounds up the September 2026 Microsoft Fabric release, covering major updates across governance, CI/CD and Git integration, OneLake catalog and APIs, data engineering and Spark runtime improvements, warehouse features, real-time intelligence (Eventstream/Eventhouse/Activator), and Fabric IQ/MCP capabilities for agent-driven workflows.

Faisal Mohamood and Bogdan Crivat outline a guided modernization path from Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Fabric, covering the new “view in Fabric” upgrade experience, migration assessment and incremental upgrades, and migration assistants for Spark and dedicated SQL pools into Fabric Data Engineering and Fabric Data Warehouse.

Faisal Mohamood summarizes the FabCon/SQLCon Barcelona 2026 announcements for Fabric Data Factory, covering new mirroring sources, multicloud data distribution improvements, faster and more reusable transformations (Power Query, Dataflow Gen2, notebooks, dbt), richer monitoring, and MCP-based AI assistance across authoring and operations.

Arun Ulag summarizes the FabCon and SQLCon Barcelona 2026 announcements across Microsoft Fabric and Azure SQL, focusing on how Fabric IQ, OneLake, and new agent experiences aim to provide governed business context for Copilot, analytics, and data/AI applications, plus new observability and database management capabilities.

The Microsoft Azure Team introduces an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) Lifecycle policy that standardizes how VM series move through lifecycle stages, what customers can expect at each stage, and how to plan workload transitions with clearer timelines, availability expectations, and purchasing options.

Microsoft Security Research, Yossi Weizman and Tushar Mudi detail Storm-3168 (JADEPUFFER) activity in Azure, showing how compromised service principals were used for reconnaissance, rapid resource deletion, and credential access. The post breaks down the observed sequence and provides concrete mitigations using Defender for Cloud, RBAC hardening, secret rotation, and recovery protections.

Tina Schuchman outlines new Microsoft Foundry capabilities for building and operating production AI agents, including broader model choice (GPT-6 and Claude Opus 5.5), voice agents, long-running hosted agent resilience, and an AgentOps-style loop that uses traces and evaluators to continuously improve quality, latency, and cost.

Muzz Imam walks through setting outbound network egress rules for Microsoft AI Foundry hosted agents, using an account-level RAI policy to allow specific FQDN destinations, observe real outbound calls in Audit mode, and then validate blocking behavior under Enforced mode with a controlled probe.

Linda Li announces the general availability of Routines in Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, a managed way to run agents on schedules or in response to external events. The post explains trigger types, how agents can resume long-running work with reminders, and how unattended execution can use either creator identity or an agent identity in Entra ID.

Dan Taylor walks through recent Microsoft Agent Framework updates that make agents more usable in real apps: interactive UIs via AG-UI, longer-term memory via Foundry Agent Service (and Cosmos DB alternatives), CodeAct for multi-step execution, and resilient hosting for recoverable long-running workflows in both Python and .NET.

Simon Frost explains how the Microsoft Discovery app and Premonition Insights on Azure can speed up exploratory analysis of wastewater metagenomics, while keeping human scientific judgment in control. The post walks through an end-to-end workflow: literature grounding, taxonomic filtering, weather-data enrichment, phylogenetic verification, and interactive dashboards.

Mark Russinovich, Adam Bogobowicz and Molina Sharma explain why resilience on Azure can’t be proven by an architecture diagram alone, and why teams need continuous validation as workloads change—especially when AI models and other probabilistic dependencies become part of the critical path.

Mike Hulme explains what changes when software shifts from request/response apps to continuously running AI agents, and why “agent-first” platforms need governance, identity, tracing, and runtime guardrails. The post connects Microsoft Foundry governance with Azure Container Apps Sandboxes for isolated, per-task execution at scale.

Naomi Moneypenny announces GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna as generally available in Microsoft Foundry alongside GPT-6 Astra, and explains how to pick models and deployment options for production AI agents. The post covers evaluation and monitoring in Foundry, regional and data-zone availability, pricing by token type, and safety controls like guardrails and prompt-injection mitigation.

Amar Badal announces Claude Opus 5.5 availability in Microsoft Foundry, focusing on long-running agentic coding and knowledge-work scenarios, plus new capabilities for maintaining continuity in extended conversations (compaction, tool changes, and prompt caching) and updated safeguards and pricing for Azure-hosted deployments.

Vishnu Charan TJ shows how to use Azure Blob Storage as a durable, shareable “virtual filesystem” for LangChain Deep Agents, including a Python setup walkthrough, identity-based authentication with DefaultAzureCredential, and practical guidance for routing durable paths, isolating containers, and applying least-privilege access.

Roger Barreto and Tao Chen explain how Foundry hosted agent isolation works in Microsoft Agent Framework, breaking it into user isolation (who the request represents) and session isolation (which sandbox and files persist). They show how to pass delegated identities and how to create, reuse, and pool Foundry hosted sessions in .NET and Python.

Bruno Capuano introduces MafClaw, a four-part live series that builds a production-ready AI agent in C# using the Microsoft Agent Framework harness—starting from a minimal IChatClient wrapper and progressively adding tools, planning, safe file access, approvals, memory, skills, code execution, observability, governance, evaluations, and deployment to Microsoft Foundry.

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.

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.

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.