azureweekly.info

#558 - 12th April 2026

2026-04-12T00:00:00.00Z

Welcome to Issue 558 of The Azure Weekly Newsletter. Highlights this week include: MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2 in Microsoft Foundry: Microsoft announces public preview of three new in-house multimedia models on Foundry: MAI-Transcribe-1 for speech recognition across 25 languages at roughly half the GPU cost of leading alternatives, MAI-Voice-1 for high-fidelity speech generation that produces a minute of audio in under a second, and MAI-Image-2, a text-to-image model that debuted in the top three on the Arena.ai leaderboard.

Getting Started with Foundry Local: A Student Guide to the Microsoft Foundry Local Lab: a walkthrough of the Microsoft Foundry Local Lab aimed at students and self-taught developers, covering a thirteen-part hands-on path from installing the local runtime through SDK use, RAG, single and multi-agent workflows, evaluation-led development, Whisper transcription, custom ONNX models, tool calling, and a browser-based capstone UI.

How Do We Know AI Isn't Lying? The Art of Evaluating LLMs in RAG Systems: a practical guide to evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems, explaining why probabilistic LLM output is hard to grade, breaking down the key metrics (relevance, faithfulness, groundedness, completeness, hallucination rate), and introducing tools such as RAGAS, LangChain evaluators, and the emerging LLM-as-a-Judge pattern.

Visual Studio March Update – Build Your Own Custom Agents: The March update for Visual Studio 2026 Insiders introduces customisable GitHub Copilot agents defined as .agent.md files in your repo, reusable agent skills, a new language-aware find_symbol tool, enterprise MCP allowlist governance, Copilot-powered test profiling and live perf tips during debugging, and one-click NuGet vulnerability fixes.

Continued Investment in Azure App Service: a recap of ongoing Azure App Service investment, highlighting Premium v4 for higher performance, the new App Service Managed Instance for workloads needing deeper environment control, regular runtime updates across .NET, Node.js, Python, Java and PHP, expanded availability zone support, and improved GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps deployment workflows, including the recent GA of Aspire on App Service.

The Durable Task Scheduler Consumption SKU is now Generally Available: The pay-as-you-go Consumption SKU of Azure's Durable Task Scheduler is now generally available, offering a fully managed orchestration backend for AI agent workflows, event-driven pipelines, and distributed transactions with up to 500 actions per second, 30 days of history, Entra ID authentication, and no idle costs.

Azure Container Apps Blue-Green Terraform Deployment: a walkthrough of implementing zero-downtime blue-green deployments on Azure Container Apps entirely through Terraform, using revision labels, weighted traffic, and an enable_blue_green flag to manage the two-apply lifecycle, with instant rollback by flipping traffic back to the still-warm previous revision.

Enterprise-Scale Azure Subscription Vending Using Azure Verified Modules (AVM): a production-ready guide to automating Azure subscription creation at scale using the Azure Verified Modules subscription vending pattern with Terraform, covering management group placement, the often-tricky Subscription Creator role assignment at the EA enrollment-account scope, and alignment with Azure Landing Zone best practices.

General Availability of Private Application Gateway on Azure Application Gateway v2: application Gateway v2 now supports fully private deployments at general availability, removing the long-standing public IP requirement and enabling private IP-only frontends, full NSG and route table control, deny-all outbound rules, and forced tunneling through hub firewalls or on-premises appliances for regulated and landing-zone workloads.

#557 - 29th March 2026

2026-03-29T00:00:00.00Z

There is still a flood of Fabric related announcements post FabCon Atlanta 2026 this week: Upgrade your Synapse pipelines to Microsoft Fabric with confidence (Preview): Microsoft has launched a public preview migration assistant that helps organisations move their Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Data Factory pipelines into Microsoft Fabric Data Factory. Gain full visibility into your Copy jobs with Workspace Monitoring in Microsoft Fabric (Preview): Fabric's Workspace Monitoring feature now surfaces detailed logs, performance metrics, and job-status visibility for Copy jobs, helping developers and admins troubleshoot, optimise, and monitor data-movement operations from one place.

A wave of new Dataflow Gen2 capabilities at FabCon Atlanta 2026: Microsoft announced a broad set of Dataflow Gen2 updates, including a faster Modern Query Evaluator, Variable Library integration now generally available for CI/CD-ready parameterisation, and new preview destinations such as Snowflake and Excel files. Microsoft Fabric FabCon 2026 announcements that will transform your data stack: a breakdown the five most impactful FabCon 2026 announcements for enterprise data teams.

New data protection capabilities in Microsoft Fabric: Native security for the modern data estate: Microsoft has expanded its Purview-powered security features in Fabric, extending Data Loss Prevention (DLP) restrict-access policies to all structured data in OneLake, adding Insider Risk Management coverage for Fabric lakehouses, and introducing preview capabilities to detect sensitive data in Copilot and AI agent interactions. Graph-powered AI reasoning (Preview): Fabric now offers a graph-powered AI reasoning harness that translates natural-language questions into Graph Query Language (NL2GQL), enabling AI agents to perform explicit, auditable multi-hop reasoning over enterprise relationship data rather than producing opaque probabilistic answers.

Introducing new Git developer experiences in Microsoft Fabric (Preview): Three new Git integration capabilities have entered preview in Fabric: Branched Workspaces that track the parent–child relationship between workspaces, Selective Branching to branch out only the items you need, and a Compare Code Changes diff view so developers can review exactly what will change before committing. Fabric notebooks support Lakehouse auto-binding in Git (Preview): Fabric notebooks can now automatically resolve the correct default lakehouse as they move across Git-connected workspaces such as dev, test, and prod, eliminating the manual rebinding step that previously slowed down multi-environment CI/CD workflows. Fabric Notebook Public APIs (Generally Available): Fabric Notebook Public APIs are now generally available, giving teams full programmatic CRUD control over notebooks and the ability to trigger, parameterise, and monitor notebook runs via the Job Scheduler API, enabling notebooks to be managed as first-class assets in automated pipelines.

What's new with Microsoft in open-source and Kubernetes at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026: At KubeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, Microsoft announced that Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) has graduated to general availability in Kubernetes, enabling GPU-backed AI workloads to be scheduled as first-class cloud-native citizens, alongside new AKS cluster lifecycle improvements such as blue-green agent pool upgrades and rollback. Aspire on Azure App Service is now Generally Available: Aspire's code-first distributed application model is now generally available on Azure App Service, letting developers define their hosting topology in the AppHost project and deploy to a fully managed, auto-patching platform without abandoning the familiar Aspire programming model.

Finally, Azure Sphere is Retiring in 2031 - What you need to know: Microsoft has announced that the Azure Sphere service, including device attestation, OS updates, and security patches, will be fully retired on 31 July 2031, giving existing customers a five-year window to evaluate modern Azure IoT alternatives and refresh hardware designs away from the MT3620 microcontroller.

#556 - 22nd March 2026

2026-03-22T00:00:00.00Z

This week saw FabCon and SQLCon 2026 in Atlanta, so as you might expect, the content is quite Fabric heavy this week; but in other news, a number of retirements have been announced, so it's worth digging into those to see if you're impacted. Starting with the major announcements at FabCon: FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single data platform: Microsoft's headline FabCon 2026 keynote blog from Arun Ulag covers the full scope of announcements, including Fabric data agents reaching GA, Runtime 2.0 preview with Apache Spark 4.x, materialized lake views GA, OneLake security coming soon, and the first-ever joint SQLCon event serving 8,000 attendees.
FabCon and SQLCon 2026: What's new in Microsoft OneLake: FabCon Atlanta 2026 brings a raft of OneLake updates including shortcut transformations reaching GA, Snowflake interoperability, workspace tags for AI agent discoverability, a public preview of Fabric remote MCP, and the announcement of Auger as a premier supply chain partner building natively on Fabric.
What's new and improved for SQL database in Fabric (Generally Available): Following its GA release at Microsoft Ignite, SQL database in Microsoft Fabric gains a Migration Assistant for moving SQL Server workloads into Fabric, dynamic data masking, improved point-in-time backup restore, and significant vector index enhancements for AI applications.
Maps in Microsoft Fabric (Generally Available): Maps in Microsoft Fabric has reached general availability at FabCon Atlanta 2026, bringing geospatial visualisation of real-time and large-scale location data to any data citizen, with new tile-set scheduling, data-driven styling, and WMS/WMTS service connectivity.

Audit columns in Copy job in Fabric Data Factory - every row is traceable for data lineage and compliance: Fabric Data Factory's Copy Job now supports audit columns that embed row-level provenance metadata directly into destination data, closing the gap between job-level lineage tracking and the granular, per-row traceability that compliance teams in regulated industries require.
New Microsoft Purview innovations for Fabric to safely accelerate your AI transformation: Announced at FabCon Atlanta, new Microsoft Purview capabilities for Fabric include GA DLP policies for Fabric Warehouse, preview DLP for KQL and SQL databases, Insider Risk Management indicators for Lakehouses, and improved data quality and catalog workflow tools to support responsible AI adoption.
The updated Copilot for data engineering and data science (Preview): An updated Copilot experience in Microsoft Fabric notebooks now delivers always-on, context-aware assistance that automatically understands your workspace, lakehouse, and execution environment, and adds a one-click Fix with Copilot button whenever a cell execution or Spark job fails.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - we'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago. I had hoped to get this ready in time for FabCon, but to quote Douglas Adams: "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

There have been a number of Agentic announcements: Microsoft Launches Azure Skills Plugin to Give AI Coding Agents Real Azure Expertise: Microsoft's new Azure Skills Plugin bundles over 20 curated Azure workflow skills and MCP servers into a single install, enabling AI coding agents like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code to reason about and execute real Azure deployments rather than offering generic guidance.
Using MCPs with GitHub Copilot without installing anything locally: Tobias Fenster demonstrates how to run MCP servers through GitHub Codespaces rather than locally, letting non-developers and those in restricted environments use Azure DevOps and AL Symbols MCP tools with GitHub Copilot without touching their own machines.
Azure Pricing Skill for GitHub Copilot Using Azure MCP: Thomas Thornton shares a custom azure-pricing agent skill that connects GitHub Copilot to the Azure Retail Prices API via the Azure MCP tool, bringing live cost estimates into architectural conversations so pricing becomes part of the design process rather than an afterthought.

Finally, The AKS Book Is Out. Every AKS Decision That Will Save You a Cluster Rebuild: Microsoft MVP Richard Hooper (Pixel Robots) announces the publication of The AKS Book: The Real-World Guide to Azure Kubernetes Service, a practical guide distilling years of production experience into the key architectural decisions that prevent the painful cluster rebuilds he has seen teams repeat over and over. (Editor's Note: I've just bought a copy).

#555 - 15th March 2026

2026-03-15T00:00:00.00Z

A good mixture of official announcements and community content this week. In AI: With its latest Phi-4 reasoning model, Microsoft reckons bigger isn’t always better: Microsoft’s new Phi-4-Reasoning-Vision-15B model shows that compact, carefully trained multimodal models can rival much larger systems by prioritising high-quality reasoning data over raw scale, and ships with three switchable thinking modes so developers can tune compute to the task at hand. A closer look at Work IQ: Work IQ is the intelligence layer inside Microsoft 365 Copilot that personalises responses by combining secure access to your organisation’s M365 and Dynamics 365 data, a contextual memory built from chat history and activity patterns, and a growing library of specialised skills and tools, with a public API preview landing this month. Build a Fully Offline RAG App with Foundry Local: No Cloud Required: A hands-on walkthrough for building a fully air-gapped Retrieval-Augmented Generation support agent using Microsoft Foundry Local, Node.js, and SQLite; no cloud, GPU, or embedding model required, with the same OpenAI-compatible API that makes the code trivially portable to Azure when connectivity is available. From Prompt Engineering to AI Programming: Building Enterprise-Ready Generative AI Solutions: argues that closing the gap between an impressive AI demo and a reliable production system requires applying the same engineering disciplines used elsewhere: testable components, labelled evaluation datasets, systematic metrics, and observability — to LLM integrations rather than treating them as magic black boxes.

In Infrastructure: The Startup-Scale Landing Zone: Get Azure right from day one: Introduces the open-source Startup-Scale Landing Zone (SSLZ), an opinionated Bicep/Terraform template that gives early-stage startups production-ready Azure governance, RBAC, security defaults, and budget alerts in under an hour, with an explicit migration path to the full Azure Landing Zone when the team and workloads eventually outgrow it. Designing and Implementing a Tagging Strategy for Azure Update Manager: Presents a lean, policy-enforced tagging taxonomy for Azure Update Manager that uses dynamic scopes to automatically assign newly provisioned VMs and Arc-enabled servers to the correct patch schedule the moment the right tag is applied. Stop Burning Money in Azure Storage: A practical cost-optimisation guide that explains when to use each of Azure Blob Storage’s five access tiers, compares the trade-offs between Smart Tier and Lifecycle Management policies, and highlights the early-deletion penalties and small-file transaction costs that quietly inflate storage bills.

Finally, Tracing Packets in Azure Networks: A comprehensive troubleshooting toolkit for Azure network engineers, walking through firewall logs, Virtual Network Flow Logs, PaaS diagnostics settings, Network Watcher features, and on-demand packet capture — including a practical tip on uploading Wireshark JSON exports to an AI for rapid packet analysis. It’s Not Always Azure: A real-world troubleshooting case study that traces an Azure VM RDP failure through NSG checks, platform redeployment, and guest OS diagnostics before identifying the root cause as a third-party security product silently re-enabling and misconfiguring Windows Firewall after an update. Implementing the Backend-for-Frontend BFF / Curated API Pattern Using Azure API Management: Shows how Azure API Management’s policy engine can serve as a lightweight BFF layer by fanning out parallel calls to multiple backend services and returning a single, client-optimised composite response — without writing or deploying any additional aggregation code.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago.

#554 - 8th March 2026

2026-03-08T00:00:00.00Z

Highlights this week include: Introducing GPT-5.4 in Microsoft Foundry: OpenAI's GPT-5.4 is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry, bringing improved reasoning consistency, stronger instruction alignment, lower latency, and integrated computer-use capabilities for building reliable, production-grade agentic workflows at scale. The Great Foundry Shift: Microsoft Foundry New vs Classic Explained: A comprehensive layer-by-layer comparison of Microsoft Foundry (New) and Foundry (Classic), covering the move to a simplified CognitiveServices resource model, multi-agent workflow orchestration, long-term memory, a 1,400+ tool catalog with MCP/A2A support, and clear guidance on when to migrate. Even Simpler to Safely Execute AI-generated Code with Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions: Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions now exposes a built-in MCP endpoint, allowing AI agents to execute Python, Node.js, or shell code inside millisecond-startup Hyper-V-isolated sandboxes, with new samples demonstrating integration with the Microsoft Agent Framework.

The Future of Identity: Self-Service Account Recovery Preview in Microsoft Entra: Microsoft Entra's new Self-Service Account Recovery preview eliminates the vulnerable human help-desk step by verifying user identity through government-ID document forensics, biometric liveness checks, and face matching, then automatically issuing a Temporary Access Pass to bootstrap a new device without any agent involvement.

Azure Databricks Lakebase is now generally available: Azure Databricks Lakebase reaches GA, offering a serverless Postgres database that decouples compute from storage, integrates with Unity Catalog governance, and is purpose-built to support AI-native patterns such as real-time feature serving and agent memory directly on the lakehouse. Scaling API Ingestion with the Queue-of-Work Pattern: By decomposing large API ingestion jobs into thousands of small independent work items processed by concurrent Azure Container Apps workers via Azure Storage Queue, one team cut their data ingestion time from 15 hours to under 2 hours while gaining automatic retry handling and fault tolerance at lower cost than traditional orchestration tools.

Finally, two interesting posts about Drasi: Change-Driven Architecture on Azure with Drasi: A deep-dive into why polling-based event detection wastes compute and introduces latency, and how Drasi's Change Data Capture approach: running continuous Cypher queries over a live PostgreSQL stream, which delivers near-instantaneous event detection with declarative, version-controlled logic. How Netstar Streamlined Fleet Monitoring and Reduced Custom Integrations with Drasi: Fleet solutions provider Netstar replaced a sprawl of bespoke integration pipelines with a single Drasi-powered change-driven architecture, using continuous queries over Azure SQL and Event Hub to deliver real-time alerts and unified Grafana monitoring for logistics customers including Maersk.

#553 - 1st March 2026

2026-03-01T00:00:00.00Z

Quite a packed edition this week. Highlights include: Build Sensitivity Label‑Aware, Secure RAG with Azure AI Search and Purview - Azure AI Search now integrates with Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels so that RAG and Copilot-style applications can index protected documents and enforce label-based access controls at query time. Integrating Microsoft Foundry with OpenClaw: Step by Step Model Configuration - A walkthrough of deploying models from Microsoft Foundry's catalog and configuring them as the reasoning backend for OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework that executes tasks and controls browsers locally.

Rethinking Background Workloads with Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps - A comparison of Azure Functions on Container Apps (ideal for event-driven, orchestrated workflows with built-in triggers and Durable Functions) versus Container App Jobs (better suited to containerised batch workloads requiring full runtime control). Host Declarative Markdown-Based Agents on Azure Functions - An experimental feature that lets you deploy AGENTS.md-based agent projects, complete with skills, MCP tools, and custom Python functions, to Azure Functions as scalable cloud APIs with a single azd up command. Ian Griffiths appeared On .NET Live to talk about Reactive Extensions for .NET - Rx.NET v7 and Futures and a published a blog post which shares the code from the demos.

Finally, An introduction to the Native Execution Engine for Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric's Native Execution Engine uses vectorized C++ execution powered by open-source Velox and Apache Gluten to accelerate Spark jobs with no code changes, delivering up to 4× faster queries at no additional compute cost. Zero-copy access to OneLake data in Azure Databricks (Preview) - OneLake catalog federation now lets Azure Databricks query data stored in Microsoft Fabric's OneLake directly through Unity Catalog, eliminating the need for data copies, extra pipelines, or redundant refresh schedules.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago.

#552 - 22nd February 2026

2026-02-22T00:00:00.00Z

There are quite a few interesting announcements and updates this week. Here are the highlights: Custom Agents in Visual Studio: Built in and Build-Your-Own agents – Visual Studio now ships preset AI agents for debugging, profiling, testing, and modernisation, alongside a preview framework for building custom agents via .agent.md files with MCP support for connecting to external knowledge sources. Shipping Features Faster with Copilot CLI – An overview of how GitHub Copilot CLI accelerates Azure development by translating natural language into Azure CLI commands, compressing feedback loops, and dramatically reducing context-switching between documentation and terminal. How I Used GitHub Copilot CLI to Build an Azure Governance Web App: From Zero to Maturity Score in One Weekend – A detailed walkthrough of building a comprehensive Azure governance and FinOps web application in a single weekend using GitHub Copilot CLI with the Azure MCP Server, covering budgets, cost management, tagging compliance, security posture, and an improving the overall maturity score.

In Data & Analytics: Microsoft ODBC Driver for Microsoft Fabric Data Engineering (Preview) – A new enterprise-grade ODBC 3.x driver that enables .NET, Python, and other ODBC-compatible applications to connect to and query Spark workloads in Microsoft Fabric via Livy APIs, with deep lakehouse integration and Entra ID authentication. Official support for Microsoft fabric-cicd tool – The open-source fabric-cicd Python library for CI/CD automation across Microsoft Fabric workspaces is now officially supported and Microsoft-backed, addressing cross-workspace deployment challenges including dependency management and parameterisation. Share bundled Fabric Items in Fabric Org Apps – A walkthrough of using the new Fabric Org Apps feature (public preview) to bundle and share multiple Fabric items such as Real-Time Dashboards, Maps, and Notebooks as customisable, read-only packages for consumers within an organisation.

Finally, Unified tooling in the AKS MCP server (Public Preview) – The AKS MCP server now defaults to unified tools (call_az and call_kubectl) replacing legacy specialised tools, with a new --enabled-components flag for granular control over which components are active. Azure Quick Review (azqr) 3.0: Breaking Changes and Migration Guide – Version 3.0 of the Azure Quick Review CLI tool introduces breaking changes, replacing individual boolean flags with a unified --stages flag and changing cost analysis, Defender recommendations, and Arc scans to disabled by default. Azure Bicep Snapshots – Test and Validate Your Code and Deployments – A new preview feature in Bicep v0.36.1 that lets you locally generate and validate ARM resource definitions from parameter files without deploying to Azure, producing what-if style diff output to catch issues before deployment.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago.

#551 - 15th February 2026

2026-02-15T00:00:00.00Z

Highlights this week include: OneLake catalog: The trusted catalog for organizations worldwide - Microsoft's OneLake catalog provides a central hub for discovering, managing, governing, and securing data across the Fabric platform, now adopted by over 230,000 organizations worldwide. Supercharge AI, BI, and data engineering with Semantic Link (GA) - Semantic Link reaches general availability in Microsoft Fabric, unifying AI, BI, and data engineering through a shared semantic layer that streamlines workflows across data science, reporting, and automation. Enrich Power BI reports with machine learning in Microsoft Fabric - A walkthrough of an end-to-end pattern for adding ML predictions such as churn scoring to Power BI reports, using Fabric's unified semantic models, notebooks, and scoring endpoints.

VS Code becomes multi-agent command center for developers - VS Code v1.109 lets developers orchestrate GitHub Copilot, Anthropic Claude, and OpenAI Codex agents side by side, transforming the editor into a unified multi-agent development hub. Choosing the Right Model in GitHub Copilot: A Practical Guide for Developers - A practical guide to selecting the right AI model in GitHub Copilot for different tasks, from fast lightweight models for quick edits to deep reasoning models for complex debugging and agentic workflows. Azure Databricks Supervisor Agent (GA) - Databricks Agent Bricks Supervisor Agent is now generally available, offering a managed orchestration layer that coordinates multiple AI agents and tools from a single entry point, governed by Unity Catalog.

Finally, What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)? - An explainer about RAG, which uses a retail example - analysing customer reviews about delivery, to explore the technique of retrieving relevant information and injecting it into an LLM's context to ground responses in domain-specific data and reduce hallucinations.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago.

#550 - 8th February 2026

2026-02-08T00:00:00.00Z

Highlights this week include: Agent Skills for Azure Bicep with GitHub Copilot: From Manual Work to Automated Workflows: learn how to create reusable Agent Skills in GitHub Copilot that package domain expertise into automated workflows for Azure Bicep, including four ready-to-use skills for formatting, type conversion, and Azure Verified Modules migration. Writing Effective Prompts for Testing Scenarios: AI Assisted Quality Engineering: a deep dive into prompt design patterns for AI-assisted testing, covering role-based, few-shot, and context-rich prompting techniques that move QA teams beyond shallow test generation toward reliable, high-coverage outputs. Getting more out of Copilot with Copilot Pages: an overview and live demo of Copilot Pages, which turn Copilot Chat outputs into collaborative, editable canvases that support rich content, real-time co-editing, and seamless sharing across M365 apps.

Building Smarter Agents with FoundryIQ: Microsoft's Agentic RAG Platform: introduces FoundryIQ, a fully managed knowledge layer that enables agentic RAG by autonomously decomposing complex queries, planning multi-source searches, and synthesising answers across SharePoint, Blob Storage, OneLake, and the web. Observability in Generative AI: Building Trust with Systematic Evaluation in Microsoft Foundry: explains how Microsoft Foundry supports GenAIOps observability through evaluators for quality, safety, RAG grounding, and agent behaviour across the full lifecycle from model selection through production monitoring.

Serverless workspaces in Azure Databricks (GA): Azure Databricks serverless workspaces are now generally available, offering a fully managed SaaS experience with pre-configured serverless compute and default storage that eliminates the need for manual networking, cluster, and storage setup. Bringing together Fabric Real-time Intelligence, Notebook and Spark Structured Streaming Preview: a new preview integration lets developers access Eventstreams directly inside Spark Notebooks with auto-generated PySpark code and secure, secret-free connectivity, enabling low-latency real-time analytics and AI pipelines within Microsoft Fabric.

Reference Architecture for Highly Available Multi-Region Azure Kubernetes Service AKS: a practical reference architecture for running AKS across multiple Azure regions using Azure Front Door, geo-replicated data services, and regional ingress layers, with detailed trade-off analysis of active/active, active/passive, and cold standby deployment patterns.

Finally, upcoming community events: Join us at SQLCon 2026 (March 16–20) co-locates with FabCon in Atlanta featuring 50+ SQL sessions and shared keynotes, and SQLBits 2026 returns to ICC Wales (April 22–25) covering SQL Server 2025, Microsoft Fabric, AI-powered analytics, and more. Book your tickets now.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago.

#549 - 1st February 2026

2026-02-01T00:00:00.00Z

Highlights this week include: Azure Static Web Apps Skill for GitHub Copilot – A new GitHub Copilot skill that reduces Azure Static Web Apps deployment time from 30+ minutes to under 3 minutes through guided framework detection, configuration, and deployment. Azure Databricks Agent Bricks Knowledge Assistant (GA) – Now generally available, this feature empowers you to create, deploy, and manage AI agents directly within the Azure Databricks platform, using unified data and AI capabilities.

Secure AI Agents with Microsoft Entra Agent ID – Microsoft's new Agent ID (public preview) provides identity, governance, conditional access, and lifecycle management for AI agents through a unified registry across Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and Security Copilot. Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations (GA) – Now generally available, this tool uses AI-powered search, semantic embeddings, and risk scoring to investigate data security incidents at scale with new purge mitigation capabilities. Azure Savings Plans Explained – A clear breakdown of Azure Savings Plans offering savings through hourly commitments, covering the use-it-or-lose-it model, discount calculations, and practical guidance on when they make sense.

Fabric January 2026 Feature Summary – Highlights include Item Reference variables for unified configuration, direct VS Code notebook editing, AI-powered catalog experiences, and enhancements across Data Engineering, Warehouse, and Real-Time Intelligence. Fabric Connection inside Notebook (Preview) – Notebooks can now use cloud connections (Azure Blob Storage, PostgreSQL, S3, Key Vault, and more) directly via Get Data, with code snippet generation for accessing external data sources. Workspace Outbound Access Protection for Data Factory and OneLake Shortcuts (Preview) – Extends workspace-level outbound access protection to Pipelines, Copy jobs, Dataflows, and OneLake Shortcuts, enabling granular control over external connections.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago.

Finally, Barry Smart has written a 4-part series which covers how we (endjin) have improved our data engineering approach in the past year by migrating workloads from PySpark / Pandas to Polars: Polars: Faster Pipelines, Simpler Infrastructure, Happier Engineers – Makes the case for Polars as the default DataFrame choice, delivering 5-20x faster performance than Pandas with 8x less energy consumption for most analytical workloads. Under the Hood: What Makes Polars So Scalable and Fast? – Deep dive into Polars' Rust foundation, Apache Arrow columnar storage, lazy evaluation with query optimization, and vectorized SIMD execution. Practical Polars: Code Examples for Everyday Data Tasks – Hands-on examples covering data loading, expressions, filtering, lazy evaluation, DuckDB integration, and streaming execution for larger-than-RAM datasets. Polars Workloads on Microsoft Fabric – Practical guide to running Polars in Fabric notebooks, including path construction, storage options, Delta Lake integration, and tips for code portability between local and cloud environments.

#548 - 25th January 2026

2026-01-25T00:00:00.00Z

A relatively quiet edition this week, but there are still some thoroughly interesting articles. Here are the highlights: Improving Efficiency through Adaptive CPU Uncore Power Management – Microsoft and Intel co-designed Efficiency Latency Control (ELC) for Intel Xeon 6 processors, achieving up to 11% power reduction under moderate loads while maintaining performance. Which Azure network design is cheaper? – A detailed cost comparison of Azure networking architectures (hub-and-spoke, Virtual WAN, indirect spokes, and AVNM) revealing that Virtual WAN is often the most cost-effective for large-scale deployments.

Simplifying Image Signing with Notary Project and Artifact Signing (GA) – Azure Artifact Signing reaches general availability, combining with the CNCF Notary Project to provide managed certificate signing for container images with short-lived certificates and verified Azure identities. Using on-behalf-of flow for Entra-based MCP servers – A guide to implementing OAuth on-behalf-of flow in Python FastMCP servers, enabling MCP tools to access Microsoft Graph API using the user's Entra identity.

Azure Playwright Testing Service (Preview): Run Playwright Tests on Cloud Browsers – A new preview service enabling developers to run Playwright tests on cloud-hosted browsers without managing infrastructure, supporting parallel execution and detailed trace analysis.

Simplifying data movement across multiple clouds with Copy job – Microsoft Fabric Copy job expands multi-cloud connectivity with new incremental copy connectors and CDC support for SAP Datasphere Outbound to Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7(!) years ago.

#547 - 18th January 2026

2026-01-18T00:00:00.00Z

Here are the highlights from this edition:

Gain even more trust and compliance with OneLake diagnostics immutability (Generally Available) - Tom Peplow explains how immutable OneLake diagnostics logs improve auditability, trust, and regulatory compliance. How the Microsoft SQL team is investing in SQL tools and experiences - Anna Hoffman outlines ongoing investments in SQL tools, developer productivity, and modern data experiences.

GPT 5.2 Codex in Microsoft Foundry Enterprise Grade AI for Secure Software Engineering - Naomi Moneypenny announces GPT 5.2 Codex bringing secure, enterprise focused AI coding to Microsoft Foundry. VS Code Workspaces for better AI assistant context - Elio Struyf shows how VS Code Workspaces improve AI assistant context across multi project development. Copilot Memories by Jessie Houghton Jessie Houghton introduces Copilot Memories to retain team preferences and improve consistent coding workflows. From Zero to Hero: AgentOps End to End Lifecycle Management for Production AI Agents - Manoranjan Rajguru walks through managing the full lifecycle of production AI agents with AgentOps.

And finally, Advancing embodied carbon measurement at scale for Microsoft Azure hardware - Leo Aspauza details how Microsoft measures and scales embodied carbon tracking across Azure hardware.

#546 - 11th January 2026

2026-01-11T00:00:00.00Z

After a two-week break, we're back with our first newsletter of 2026. Some highlights from this edition:
Context Engineering Lessons from Building Azure SRE Agent – Microsoft's team discovered that consolidating 100+ narrow tools into 5 wide ones and focusing on context engineering—not model upgrades—was the key to building reliable autonomous site reliability agents.
Context Engineering with Microsoft Agent Framework's Context Provider API – A practical guide to building context-aware agents using the Context Provider API, demonstrating patterns for managing both short-term thread memory and long-term semantic memory across conversations.
The Future of Software Engineering – Jeffrey Palermo talks with Scott Hanselman about how AI is reshaping software engineering practices and development workflows.
You Can't Debug What You Can't See - AI Observability with OpenTelemetry + Microsoft Foundry – A deep technical walkthrough on implementing end-to-end tracing and evaluation for AI agents in production, making nondeterministic agent behavior visible and debuggable.
First look at Fabric Ontology – An exploration of Microsoft Fabric Ontology, showing how to combine static context data with real-time telemetry to create queryable digital twin models accessible through natural language.
Explore Fabric Security insights in the OneLake catalog – Govern tab – Security insights from Microsoft Purview Hub are transitioning to the new Admin Report in the OneLake Catalog's Govern tab, providing unified governance data where your data lives.
General Availability of Mirroring Azure Database for PostgreSQL in Microsoft Fabric – Fabric Mirroring for PostgreSQL is now GA with enterprise features including Entra ID authentication, VNET support, and high availability for near real-time analytics without ETL.
Real-Time Intelligence with Microsoft Fabric & IoT – MVP Dominick Raimato demonstrates hands-on real-time intelligence using Raspberry Pi devices and Microsoft Fabric, making complex data concepts tangible and interactive.
Automated Code Reviews in Azure DevOps using OpenAI models powered by Microsoft Foundry – A step-by-step guide to creating an AI-powered code reviewer for Azure DevOps pull requests, using structured outputs from GPT models to post inline comments at exact line numbers.
How to Create and Deploy a Diabetes Prediction Model in Azure – A comprehensive tutorial walking through creating an Azure ML workspace, building an automated training pipeline, and deploying a RandomForest classifier as a production REST API.
Public preview: Uncovering hidden threats with the Dynamic Threat Detection Agent – Microsoft Defender's new GenAI-powered agent runs continuously in the backend to uncover hidden threats across Defender and Sentinel environments, delivering alerts with natural language explanations and MITRE mappings.

#545 - 21st December 2025

2025-12-21T00:00:00.00Z

This is the final newsletter of 2025. Highlights this week include: Microsoft and NASA apply AI agents to key hydrology data, deepening our understanding of Earth — NASA and Microsoft are using AI agents powered by Azure OpenAI to make complex hydrology datasets accessible through natural language queries, helping address water scarcity, flooding, and agricultural planning challenges. From Simple Prompts to Complex Insights: AI Expands the Boundaries of Data Transformation (Preview) — Dataflow Gen2 in Microsoft Fabric introduces AI Prompt, enabling teams to apply AI-powered transformations like summarization, classification, and sentiment analysis using simple natural language prompts. Microsoft Fabric IQ Puts Ontology Back on the Map — and Back in the Confusion — An analysis of how Microsoft Fabric IQ is reintroducing ontology-based approaches to data modeling, exploring both the potential benefits and the complexity this brings to enterprise data management. 2025 Year in Review: What's new across SQL Server, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric — A comprehensive recap of 2025's SQL announcements including SQL Server 2025 GA, new vector and JSON data types, Azure SQL improvements, migration tools, and SQL database in Microsoft Fabric reaching general availability.

#544 - 14th December 2025

2025-12-14T00:00:00.00Z

First up: Next-Level RAG on Azure: Building Knowledge Bases with Azure AI Search and Foundry – A guide to designing production-ready RAG using Azure AI Search with hybrid retrieval combining keyword search, vector search, and Reciprocal Rank Fusion. Microsoft Agent Framework: Implementing Human-in-the-Loop AI Agents – How to implement human approval checkpoints in AI agents using the Microsoft Agent Framework for scenarios requiring oversight like payment processing.

Microsoft Fabric + Snowflake: Zero-copy interoperability and practical details – Microsoft and Snowflake now offer bi-directional data access using Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake formats, enabling a single copy of data across both platforms. Lakehouse Schemas (Generally Available) – Schema-enabled lakehouses are now GA and the default choice, allowing users to organize tables in folder-like structures with support for cross-workspace queries. End-to-End Observability for Azure Databricks: From Infrastructure to Internal Application Logging – A comprehensive guide covering ten approaches to monitoring Azure Databricks, from diagnostic settings and VM insights to system tables and data quality monitoring.

Finally, we've published our yearly performance benchmarks of our OSS library against the latest version of .NET (10). This year we see a 7% performance boost, which takes the cumulative improvements to 134% since .NET Core 2.0. On Surface Laptop Studio 2, we can now process 10 million messages per second.

#543 - 7th December 2025

2025-12-07T00:00:00.00Z

First-up in Analytics: Turning everyday documents from SharePoint and OneDrive into analytics ready data with OneLake shortcuts – Microsoft Fabric now enables OneLake shortcuts to SharePoint and OneDrive, bringing productivity documents like Word, Excel, and PDFs into analytics workflows without copying data. Serverless Workspaces are live in Azure Databricks – Azure Databricks Serverless workspaces are now in public preview, allowing instant workspace creation without managing VNets, compute, or storage infrastructure. Foundry IQ for Multi-Source AI Knowledge Bases – Foundry IQ enables AI agents to automatically search and retrieve information across multiple data sources using AI-powered query planning and orchestration.

In DevOps: Experiment, Prototype, and Validate Azure Bicep with the Bicep Console – The new experimental Bicep console provides a REPL environment for prototyping and validating Bicep expressions interactively without requiring Azure connections. Automatically Signing a Windows EXE with Azure Trusted Signing, dotnet sign, and GitHub Actions – A comprehensive guide to using Azure Trusted Signing with GitHub Actions to automatically code-sign Windows executables without managing certificate files. Azure Blob Storage SFTP - Resumable Uploads (GA) – Azure Blob Storage SFTP resumable uploads is now generally available, enabling users to continue failed partial file transfers from the point of failure.

Finally, View Microsoft Ignite sessions on demand – All Microsoft Ignite 2025 sessions are now available on demand for catching up on announcements and technical content.

#542 - 30th November 2025

2025-11-30T00:00:00.00Z

It's a surprisingly big issue for the traditional post-Ignite lull. Let's start off with AI: Function Calling with Small Language Models — A hands-on tutorial for implementing function calling with Qwen 2.5 using Microsoft Foundry Local, transforming small language models from passive text generators into active tool-using agents. From Concept to Code: Building Production-Ready Multi-Agent Systems with Microsoft Foundry — A three-phase guide covering design, development, and deployment of production-ready multi-agent systems using Foundry Workflows, VSCode Extensions, and the Microsoft Agent Framework. And Watch replays of Microsoft Entra sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2025 — A curated collection of replay links for identity and network access sessions from Ignite 2025, covering Zero Trust, AI agent security, and Microsoft Entra innovations.

In Analytics: Govern in OneLake Catalog for Fabric admins (Preview) — Introduces the new governance experience in OneLake catalog, providing Fabric administrators with centralised insights and tools to manage data estates from a single dashboard. And Snowflake, Fabric and Power BI Integration Options — An overview of seven connectivity options between Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric/Power BI, including mirroring capabilities for optimising costs, performance, and governance.

Other items of note: Gaining Confidence with Az CLI and Az PowerShell: Introducing What if & Export Bicep — Announces new preview features that let you preview command effects with --what-if and automatically generate Bicep templates from CLI commands before execution. Azure Governance Ignite 2025 — Recaps Azure governance announcements including Service Groups public preview, identity-based policy exemptions, and customisable machine configuration baselines aligned with CIS. And Azure Skilling at Microsoft Ignite 2025 — Highlights learning opportunities from Ignite 2025 including the Azure Skills Challenge, curated Plans on Learn, and the Microsoft Reactor Azure Skilling Series running December 3-11.

Finally, some real-world learnings: Adventures in Least Privilege: When an owner isn't an owner — Explores a subtle Entra ID gotcha where App Registration ownership doesn't automatically extend to Service Principals, and how explicit creation solves least-privilege automation challenges.

#541 - 23rd November 2025

2025-11-23T00:00:00.00Z

It's the Microsoft Ignite Special! There's *SO* much content this week. A good 50% of it is announcements from the Azure Updates Team. As ever, The Ignite Book of News 2025 is worth a browse - they've added AI summaries this year, which can help you wade through the content. There are a number of other high-level posts that might be a good entry point: Making Sense of Microsoft Ignite 2025 for Azure and AI Architects - Comprehensive overview of Ignite 2025 announcements tailored for Azure and AI architects, highlighting key architectural patterns and implementation strategies. Azure at Microsoft Ignite 2025: All the intelligent cloud news explained - Executive summary covering all major Azure announcements at Ignite 2025, including AI agents, data platform enhancements, and infrastructure innovations for building intelligent applications. Reflections from Microsoft Ignite 2025 - Podcast episode discussing key takeaways and industry implications from Microsoft Ignite 2025 announcements across Azure, AI, and enterprise platforms.

First up, AI: Azure Copilot agents and AI infrastructure innovations - Azure introduces agentic cloud operations with Azure Copilot, featuring specialized agents for migration, deployment, optimization, and troubleshooting, transforming how teams manage cloud infrastructure. Deployment capabilities preview in Azure Copilot - The Deployment Agent for Azure Copilot leverages the Azure Well-Architected Framework to help deploy production-ready workloads through natural language conversations and automated Terraform template generation. Agent mitigations and guardrail customization - New capabilities for customizing agent guardrails and implementing safety mitigations to ensure responsible AI agent deployment across Azure services. Built-in memory in Foundry Agent Service (Public Preview) - Foundry Agent Service now includes built-in memory capabilities allowing agents to maintain context across interactions for more intelligent conversational experiences. Public Preview of Agent Loop in Azure Logic Apps Consumption - Agent Loop democratizes AI-powered business process automation by bringing advanced AI agent capabilities to Logic Apps Consumption with a pay-as-you-go model and no infrastructure management. Claude in Microsoft Foundry (Public Preview) - Anthropic's Claude models (Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) join Microsoft Foundry, making Azure the only cloud offering both OpenAI and Anthropic models. GPT-5.1 Now Available in Microsoft Copilot Studio as Experimental Model - Microsoft Copilot Studio introduces experimental access to GPT-5.1, offering developers early access to next-generation language model capabilities. Azure Databricks Genie in Copilot Studio (Public Preview) - Databricks Genie integrates with Copilot Studio, enabling natural language queries against Databricks data warehouses and lakehouses directly from agents.

Next, there were a lot of Data and Analytics announcements (especially around Microsoft Fabric): Microsoft and Databricks: Advancing Openness and Interoperability with OneLake - Microsoft and Databricks partnership enhances data interoperability with OneLake, enabling seamless data sharing and integration across platforms. What's new in OneLake and the Fabric platform: more sources, security, and capacity tooling - OneLake expands with new data sources, enhanced security features, and improved capacity management tools for better data governance and scalability. Data Clustering in Fabric Data Warehouse (Preview) - Fabric Data Warehouse introduces data clustering capabilities to optimize query performance and reduce storage costs through intelligent data organization. Igniting Your Pipelines: New Data Factory Features Announced at Ignite - Data Factory in Fabric gains new features including enhanced pipeline orchestration, improved monitoring capabilities, and advanced transformation options. Mirroring for SQL Server in Microsoft Fabric (GA) - SQL Server mirroring in Fabric enables real-time data replication from on-premises SQL Server databases to Fabric, providing near-zero ETL data integration. Fabric Capacity Events in Real-Time Hub (Preview) - Real-Time Hub now streams Fabric capacity events, enabling proactive monitoring and management of compute resources and workload performance. First look at Microsoft Fabric Graph - Initial exploration of Microsoft Fabric Graph, showcasing new capabilities for graph data processing and visualization within the Fabric ecosystem. Cosmos DB in Microsoft Fabric (GA) - Cosmos DB integrates natively with Microsoft Fabric, enabling seamless NoSQL workloads alongside analytics and AI within a unified data platform. Azure Monitor to Fabric Eventhouse (Preview) - New integration streams Azure Monitor logs and metrics directly to Fabric Eventhouse for real-time analytics and observability insights. What's New for Fabric Data Agents at Ignite 2025 - Fabric Data Agents gain enhanced reasoning capabilities and improved AI interoperability, enabling more sophisticated data analysis and automated insights. From Data Platform to Intelligence Platform: Introducing Microsoft Fabric IQ - Fabric IQ transforms Fabric into an intelligence platform by organizing enterprise data around business concepts rather than tables, enabling AI agents to act on unified intelligence.

Finally, in Developer Tools: Azure MCP Server is Now Built-In with Visual Studio 2026 - Visual Studio 2026 includes built-in Azure MCP Server tools, enabling developers to manage Azure resources through natural language directly in their IDE. Visual Studio 2026 (GA) - Visual Studio 2026 reaches general availability as an AI-native IDE with integrated cloud development capabilities and enhanced productivity features. Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell (Ignite 2025 Announcement) - Azure CLI and PowerShell receive major updates including MFA enforcement, Python 3.13 compatibility, What-If parameters, and Export Bicep capabilities for enhanced security and productivity.

#540 - 16th November 2025

2025-11-16T00:00:00.00Z

First up, happy 11th Birthday to Azure Weekly! Also this week .NET 10 went GA, along with a new and much improved Visual Studio 2026: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters - Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available featuring significant performance improvements, AI-native capabilities with new C# and C++ agents, decoupled build tools, and backward compatibility with Visual Studio 2022 projects and extensions. Visual Studio 2026 introduces a refreshed user experience with improved typography and iconography, a redesigned settings system with JSON backing, 11 new tinted themes with enhanced accessibility, and customizable editor appearance options. .NET Conference 2025 also happened, and I wanted to give a shout-out to Ian Griffiths, who provided an update about the last few years of work we've done on the Reactive Extensions for .NET.

Staying withe Developer Tools: Copilot auto model selection (preview) - GitHub Copilot now features automatic model selection that intelligently chooses between GPT-5, GPT-4.1, Sonnet 4.5, and other models to optimize performance, reduce rate limiting, and provide paid users with a 10% discount on premium requests. Demystifying GitHub Copilot Security Controls: easing concerns for organizational adoption - A comprehensive guide explaining GitHub Copilot's security features including data retention policies, intellectual property indemnification, content exclusions, duplicate detection filters, and compliance certifications to help organizations adopt AI coding tools confidently.

Ignite is almost here: Top Sessions for Developers at Microsoft Ignite - A curated guide highlighting must-attend sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2025 covering AI development, GitHub Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and building multi-agent systems. Your guide to Azure Compute at Microsoft Ignite 2025 - A comprehensive guide to Azure Compute sessions at Ignite 2025, featuring updates on VM performance, resiliency, Azure Boost, and cost optimization strategies. Mission Agent Possible: Your Chance to Build, Solve, and Win at Microsoft Ignite 2025! - A developer contest at Microsoft Ignite 2025 where participants create AI agents to solve simulated crises, with prizes for both in-person and global attendees. And The Microsoft SQL Community Conference - Announcement of the Microsoft SQL Community Conference event for database professionals and developers.

I've been tracking Flatcar since Microsoft acquired Kinvolk in 2021, so I'm excited to see it making its way into Azure: Flatcar Container Linux on AKS: First Look - A hands-on exploration of Flatcar Container Linux as a new OS option for AKS node pools, highlighting its immutable filesystem, minimal attack surface, and multi-cloud consistency benefits for containerized workloads, currently available in preview. Also AKS Gets an AI Sidekick: a Deep Dive into the Agentic CLI - Azure Kubernetes Service introduces an AI-powered command-line agent that enables users to troubleshoot and manage AKS clusters using natural language queries, built on HolmesGPT and the AKS Model Context Protocol server.

Finally, an interesting post from Scott Guthrie: Infinite scale: The architecture behind the Azure AI superfactory - Microsoft unveils its second Fairwater AI datacenter in Atlanta, connected to Wisconsin to create a planet-scale AI superfactory featuring hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200/GB300 GPUs, liquid cooling, two-story design, and a dedicated AI WAN for unprecedented AI training capabilities.

#539 - 9th November 2025

2025-11-09T00:00:00.00Z

We're heading towards Microsoft Ignite 2025, which means announcements are starting to appear ahead of the event: ArcGIS GeoAnalytics for Microsoft Fabric Spark (GA) - Microsoft and Esri launched ArcGIS GeoAnalytics for Microsoft Fabric Spark in general availability, bringing over 180 spatial analytics functions directly into Fabric's data science and engineering workloads for high-speed geospatial data integration, transformation, and analysis at scale. General Availability of Larger Container Sizes on Azure Container Instances - Azure Container Instances now supports larger container sizes with up to 31 vCPU and 240 GB memory for standard containers, enabling enhanced performance for data-intensive workloads, high-performance computing, and collaborative analytics without infrastructure management.

There are a couple of MCP related updated: Build and Host an Expense Tracking MCP Server with Azure Functions - Azure Functions now supports experimental preview triggers and bindings for creating remote Model Context Protocol servers with server-sent events, enabling developers to build AI agent tools that scale automatically with key-based access control and optional network isolation. Azure MCP Server (GA) - Azure MCP Server reached general availability with version 1.0, providing a standards-based bridge between AI agents and over 40 Azure services through the Model Context Protocol, with enhanced security, performance optimizations, and support for Docker deployment.

If you're planning to attend or watch remotely: Database Innovations: Your Guide to Microsoft Ignite 2025 - Microsoft Ignite 2025 (November 18-21) features comprehensive database sessions covering SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, and Fabric Databases, with announcements on AI integration, migration tools, and real-world customer implementations.

In AI: Custom Agents Lead Microsoft AI Roadmap for Visual Studio - Microsoft's November AI roadmap for Visual Studio introduces user-created custom agents, Test and Debugger agents, GPT-5 Codex integration, concurrent agent execution, and enhanced Model Context Protocol support to transform the IDE into a fully AI-powered development environment. Use Python library for the OpenAI APIs to access GPT-5 model on Azure OpenAI Service behind Azure API Management - Developers can access GPT-5 reasoning models on Azure OpenAI Service using the standard OpenAI Python library by configuring the AzureOpenAI class with appropriate endpoints and authentication, with support for features like reasoning effort settings and developer messages.

And finally When the Cloud Falls: Understanding the AWS and Azure Outages of October 2025 - This podcast episode examines the major AWS and Azure outages that occurred in October 2025, discussing what happened, the impact on services, and lessons learned about cloud infrastructure reliability and dependency on major providers.

#538 - 2nd November 2025

2025-11-02T00:00:00.00Z

I'm sure most of you are aware of the Azure Outage that occurred last week (following on from AWS the week before); Massive Azure outage is over, but problems linger - here's what happened - Microsoft's Azure cloud platform experienced a major eight-hour outage caused by an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door, affecting services like Microsoft 365, Xbox Live, and numerous customer applications across multiple regions before being resolved. As ever Is It DNS?

There's a nice new feature which should help production workloads: Public Preview: Azure Functions zero-downtime deployments with rolling updates in Flex Consumption - Azure Functions now enables zero-downtime deployments in the Flex Consumption plan through rolling updates, allowing code and configuration changes to be applied gradually across instances without interrupting function execution. In Analytics, it's time for the Fabric October 2025 Feature Summary - Microsoft Fabric's October update introduced enhanced security features including Outbound Access Protection and Workspace-Level Private Link, smarter data engineering capabilities like Adaptive Target File Size, and new integrations such as Data Agent in Lakehouse to streamline workflows and strengthen governance. There's also the announcement of The open-source release of Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code - Microsoft released the Fabric Core extension for Visual Studio Code as open source on GitHub, providing developers with foundational capabilities for authentication, workspace management, and Git integration to build Fabric solutions directly in VS Code.

In AI: Simplify Search Development with the New Azure AI Search Wizard - Azure AI Search introduced an enhanced "Import Data" wizard that unifies keyword search, RAG, and multimodal workflows into a streamlined interface, supporting integrated vectorization, semantic ranking, and expanded data source options for faster index creation. There's also the Public Preview: AI Toolkit for GitHub Copilot Prompt-First Agent Development - The AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code now supports prompt-first AI agent development with GitHub Copilot, enabling developers to build, trace, and evaluate agents using natural language and the Microsoft Agent Framework without complex orchestration setup. I've been having some good results with SLM's: Understanding Small Language Modes - Small Language Models are compact, efficient alternatives to large language models that run directly on edge devices, offering faster responses, enhanced privacy, and reduced resource consumption while maintaining AI capabilities for everyday tasks.

And finally, Level up your Python + AI skills with our complete series - Microsoft released a comprehensive nine-part educational series covering Python AI development, including topics like LLMs, RAG, vision models, structured outputs, tool calling, AI agents, and the Model Context Protocol with free models available through GitHub.

#537 - 26th October 2025

2025-10-26T00:00:00.00Z

First up, OneLake APIs: Bring your apps and build new ones with familiar Blob and ADLS APIs Microsoft Fabric's OneLake now supports Azure Blob Storage and ADLS APIs, allowing developers to connect existing applications and tools to the Fabric ecosystem without code changes. A post very much worth reading highlighting Threat activity targeting Azure Blob Storage - Microsoft details the complete attack chain targeting Azure Blob Storage, from reconnaissance to impact, providing security recommendations and detection strategies using Defender for Storage. There's also an update to Sovereignty and Geography Groups - Azure's Locations API updates UK region metadata, changing the geography group from "Europe" to "UK" to align with compliance and data sovereignty requirements.

Other articles of interest include: Context-Aware RAG System with Azure AI Search to Cut Token Costs and Boost Accuracy - an intelligent RAG pipeline using Azure AI Search and semantic chunking reduces token consumption by up to 85% while improving accuracy through context-aware document segmentation. What's new in Microsoft Entra – September 2025 - Microsoft Entra introduces AI-driven security features including Security Copilot and Conditional Access Optimization Agent, along with updates to authentication methods and identity governance capabilities.

In development-focused posts: Planning in Visual Studio (Public Preview) Visual Studio's new planning feature in Agent Mode enables Copilot to create structured, multi-step plans for complex coding tasks, improving success rates by 15% in testing. If anyone has been using Claude Code, they know this feature adds so much value. A really interesting post, that caught my attention was Create your own custom extension for Azure Bicep The experimental Bicep local-deploy feature allows developers to create custom extensions that deploy outside Azure using familiar Bicep syntax, connecting to any REST API-enabled service. I've been using PostgreSQL for the last few months and found this an interesting read: Postgres as a Distributed Cache Unlocks Speed and Simplicity for Modern .NET Workloads A new NuGet package enables PostgreSQL to function as a high-performance distributed cache for .NET applications using UNLOGGED tables to achieve near-millisecond response times comparable to Redis. We've also been using AZD to deploy a .NET Aspire app, so this also caught my eye: .NET Aspire 6: Deployment Using Azure Container Apps A comprehensive guide to deploying .NET Aspire applications to Azure Container Apps using the Azure Developer CLI, covering infrastructure provisioning, Bicep templates, and production considerations.

Finally, Barry Smart published a 4-part series on The Data Product Canvas: Stop Building Data Products That Fail, Part 2: Deep Dive into the Building Blocks, Part 3: The Data Product Canvas in Action, and Part 4: The Theory Behind The Canvas.

#536 - 19th October 2025

2025-10-19T00:00:00.00Z

There are a raft of new announcements for Microsoft Fabric: Gain End-to-End Visibility into Data Activity Using OneLake diagnostics (GA) enables workspace administrators to track who accessed what data, when, and how across Fabric workspaces by streaming data access events as JSON logs into a Lakehouse for analysis. Job-Level Bursting Switch gives capacity administrators granular control over Spark compute resources, allowing them to optimize for either peak performance or higher concurrency by enabling or disabling the ability for individual jobs to consume burst capacity.

Top Features of Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric highlights key capabilities including native lakehouse integration, built-in file system, Data Wrangler for drag-and-drop exploration, Copilot AI assistance, fast Spark startup times, and seamless Power BI semantic model integration through Semantic Link, and Building data quality into Microsoft Fabric advocates for a validation-first approach where data quality checks become first-class citizens in pipeline design, with validation occurring early and often at multiple checkpoints throughout the data lifecycle. Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.5 is now generally available for production workloads, featuring upgrades to Apache Spark 3.5 and Delta Lake 3.2 while helping customers prepare for migration to Microsoft Fabric Spark.

In AI, Building Human-in-the-loop AI Workflows with Microsoft Agent Framework demonstrates how Microsoft Agent Framework combines deterministic workflow orchestration with autonomous AI agents for fraud detection, using a fan-out/fan-in pattern with specialized agents, checkpointing, and human review capabilities. GitHub Copilot in SSMS (Preview) brings AI-powered assistance to SQL Server Management Studio in Preview 3 of SSMS 22, providing help with writing, editing, and fixing T-SQL queries with database and schema context awareness. Celebrate National Book Month with Copilot showcases creative ways to use Microsoft Copilot for literary activities, including fighting book bans, supporting independent bookstores, setting up Little Free Libraries, and overcoming writer's block.

Finally, What is Grafana explains how Grafana serves as an open-source analytics and monitoring platform that visualizes data from multiple sources, with Azure offering both Azure Managed Grafana as a fully managed service and Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana in preview for free dashboard creation.

#535 - 12th October 2025

2025-10-12T00:00:00.00Z

This week, Github have announced that they will be prioritizing migrating to Azure over feature development, and Microsoft have announced that SAP Business Data Cloud is now available. They've also announced that the GPT-5 model family now powers Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, cross-resource metrics and alerts support for Azure Storage, and a useful post on Choosing the Right Azure Containerisation Strategy: AKS, App Service, or Container Apps

On Fabric, Miles Cole talks about optimized compaction in Fabric Spark, and Amir Jafari highlights that Fabric Data Agent now supports CI/CD, ALM Flow, and Git Integration.

Barry Smart shares his write up and analysis of Big Data LDN 2025 - where AI agents dominated, but the real story wasn't the technology, it was which organisations could actually deploy it successfully. After five years tracking industry evolution through this event, one pattern emerged clearly: the winners had built their foundations first. For CTOs making platform decisions now, the strategic imperative isn't choosing between innovation and governance; it's recognizing that governance enables innovation at scale.

And finally, Carmel's write ups of day 2 and day 3 at FabCon Vienna 2025!

#534 - 5th October 2025

2025-10-05T00:00:00.00Z

Unsurprisingly, the Fabric announcements and content are still coming in strong: Firstly, here's Carmel's summary of day 1 at FabCon! And then, on the Fabric blog, here's a run through of the new Fabric MCP features (Preview). Take a first look at Fabric Map on top of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. An overview of what's new in Fabric Data Factory for mission critical integration.

Here's an intro to the Fabric CLI: "open source, AI-ready, and more powerful". Virginia Roman runs through how to accelerate data transformation with AI Functions in Data Wrangler (Preview). And, Colby Ford discusses getting started with Agentic AI with Azure Foundry Agent Service on Fabric Data. Also on the endjin blog, James runs through reliably refreshing a Semantic Model from Microsoft Fabric Pipelines. And also, in Synapse / Data Factory, reliably refreshing a Semantic Model from Azure Data Factory or Synapse Pipelines and batch processing triggered pipeline runs in Azure Synapse.

Elsewhere, there are the upcoming changes to SQL Server on Linux Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning in Azure. Heman Kumar provides "The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft's AI Agent Ecosystem". Chris Paoli describes how Microsoft introduces Agentic capabilities in Sentinel for smarter threat defense. And John Waters highlights that Microsoft expands Copilot with Anthropic Claude AI Models - important to note as it may have an impact on policy (as it changes the Copilot policies around data protection!).

A library we used for doing real-time data processing in the cloud gets a new release: Rx.NET v6.1 Now Available, with three new features: TakeUntil(CancellationToken), DisposeWith(), and ResetExceptionDispatchState().

Finally, an interesting case study - transforming emergency response: How AI is reshaping public safety.

#533 - 28th September 2025

2025-09-28T00:00:00.00Z

This week, we have a lot of articles which cover the announcements from FabCon Vienna: Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference - James Serra provides a comprehensive summary of FabCon Vienna announcements, including new mirroring capabilities, OneLake security features, and AI-powered enhancements across the platform. Unlocking LLM-Powered through Data Agent from your Mirrored Databases - Enables direct connection of mirrored database artifacts to Fabric Data Agents, allowing Natural Language to SQL queries across operational data from various sources. Mirroring for Google BigQuery in Microsoft Fabric Preview - Extends Microsoft's zero-ETL strategy by enabling near real-time replication of BigQuery tables into OneLake for unified cross-cloud analytics.

New Innovations for Fabric Data Factory Orchestration - Introduces Copy Job item, simplified pipeline terminology, enhanced Airflow integration, and CICD support for enterprise-grade automation. View and manage security in the OneLake catalog (Preview) - New Secure tab in OneLake catalog provides centralized management of workspace roles and OneLake security roles with row-level and column-level security capabilities.

AI-Powered Real-Time Intelligence with Anomaly Detection (Preview) - No-code anomaly detection feature that automatically recommends and tests industry-standard algorithms to identify irregularities in streaming data patterns. Maps in Microsoft Fabric - Geospatial Insights for Real-Time Operations - New Map item brings location-aware analytics to Real-Time Intelligence, enabling visualization of spatial data patterns for operational insights.

Microsoft Fabric extension for VS Code - Now generally available, enabling management of Fabric workspaces and development of notebooks and Spark jobs directly within VS Code. Jenny Jiang highlights the new Fabric Spark Monitoring APIs. Fabric Spark Monitoring APIs - Generally available APIs providing Spark Advisor for performance recommendations and Resource Usage API for granular vCore allocation metrics. Fabric Spark Run Series Analysis - Advanced observability feature for understanding, comparing, and optimizing recurring Spark job executions with outlier detection and autotune integration. And finally, Fabric User Data Functions are now Generally Available - Serverless Python-based functions enabling custom business logic that can be invoked from pipelines, notebooks, and Power BI reports with async and pandas support.

#532 - 21st September 2025

2025-09-21T00:00:00.00Z

FabCon Europe 2025 was held in Vienna this week, and there was a firehose of announcements, which for non-attendees are nicely covered in the epic Fabric September 2025 Feature Summary. Also in the analytics space there's an interesting New Microsoft Purview Deployment Blueprint Lightweight guide to mitigate data leakage - A practical deployment blueprint following a good/better/best model that helps organizations quickly enable data security features across Microsoft 365 based on licensing tiers.

Highlights from all the AI posts this week: Beyond the Black Box: See Inside AI's Performance with AI Toolkit - AI Toolkit's tracing capabilities help developers monitor and debug LLM applications by tracking model interactions, token usage, and performance metrics using OpenTelemetry Protocol. Beyond OAuth: Why SCIM must evolve for the AI agent revolution - SCIM protocol needs evolution to handle AI agent identities with agent-specific schemas, event-driven provisioning, and capability management for the autonomous agent ecosystem. Join Us for a Technical Deep Dive and Q&A on Foundry Local - LLMs on device - Foundry Local team hosts an AMA session about their on-device AI inference solution that enables running LLMs locally with model customization and seamless Azure AI Foundry scaling. Building AI Apps with the Foundry Local C# SDK - Foundry Local C# SDK enables .NET developers to run AI models locally with automatic bootstrap, model management, and OpenAI-compatible APIs for offline, low-latency applications.

There have been a number of noteworthy AKS announcements: AKS Automatic with Azure Linux - AKS Automatic reaches general availability, running on Azure Linux by default to simplify Kubernetes cluster management with automated node management, scaling, and security. Introducing Image Customizer for Azure Linux - An open-source tool that enables direct customization of Azure Linux images without VMs, making the process faster, more reliable, and easier to integrate into CI/CD pipelines. Introducing WireGuard In-Transit Encryption for AKS Public Preview - WireGuard-based encryption now available in AKS public preview, providing transparent encryption for inter-node pod traffic with automatic key management. Finally, there's a fascinating article which covers Microsoft's adoption of Rust (including Hyperlight) - Microsoft Goes All-in on Rust for Core Infrastructure and Much More - Microsoft is systematically replacing C++ with Rust in critical systems including Windows, Azure, and cryptographic libraries, while developing AI-powered code translation tools.

#531 - 14th September 2025

2025-09-14T00:00:00.00Z

It's the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 this week in Vienna (Carmel and Jessica from endjin will be there), so expect lots of Fabric related announcements in the next issue! In the meantime there's a new OneLake File Explorer: Smarter, More Reliable, and Seamlessly Integrated.

There are two good posts about Azure Host Groups: Azure Compute Infrastructure: Step-by-Step Guide to Azure Host Groups and Azure Availability Sets vs Host Groups vs Availability Zones: What to Choose and When. There are two Bicep posts of note: Custom Azure Bicep chat modes for GitHub Copilot and Using Shared Variable File Pattern to simplify Azure Roles In Bicep.

Getting n8n up and running locally is just a single command (if you have docker already installed), but here's a guide to Building Agentic Workflows with n8n and Azure Container Apps. There's an interesting post about ATLAS: Your AI Tutoring Agent For Personalised Learning and also Elevating Trust in Data through Data Quality in the AI Era.

Finally, Visual Studio 2026 Insiders is here. This week .NET 10 RC was released - endjin's own Matthew Adams had a PR mentioned in Stephen Toub's epic Performance Improvements in .NET 10 (JsonMarshal.GetRawUtf8PropertyName in case you were wondering), and our yearly AIS .NET benchmarks got a mention in The Register's article Microsoft drops .NET 10 RC 'go-live' with 55,000 words on why it's faster.

#530 - 7th September 2025

2025-09-07T00:00:00.00Z

Firstly, Josh Caplan kicks off a series of blog posts about OneLake with OneLake: your foundation for an AI-ready data estate.

Next, a few announcements and updates: Gpt-realtime is now available on Azure AI Foundry and There is a new Azure AI Translator API (in public preview), and there has been an update on the Azure SRE Agent Preview.

On tooling, here is a summary of what's new in Microsoft 365 Copilot - August 2025. There are also a load of announcements from the updates team around Azure Logic Apps, which are detailed in the "Integration" section below. And, here's a summary of what's new in Fabric Warehouse - August 2025. This article highlights the upcoming FabCon Europe conference - a few of us here at endjin will be in attendance, so keep an eye out and let us know if you're around! On the same vein, Akshat Kakar highlights that you can now register for Azure Dev Summit.

And finally, a reminder of the Azure CDN retirement, and the need to migrate to Azure Front Door on December 1, 2025!

#529 - 31st August 2025

2025-08-31T00:00:00.00Z

Firstly, it is worth highlighting that registration for Microsoft Ignite is now open. Then, we have a few updates and announcements: In Azure Foundry, The Responses API is now generally available. Here are the latest GA Azure SQL updates. The Visual Studio August Update is here - providing smarter AI, better debugging, and more control, and this is the Roadmap for AI in Visual Studio - September.

BYO Model + MCP in Visual Studio Copilot is now generally available, and here is the August 2025 Fabric Feature Summary! Elsewhere, Shreyan Fern provides a great introduction to POML: The Markup Language for Prompts. On the Microsoft Security blog, Igor Sakhnov discusses Securing and governing the rise of autonomous agents, and, Rob Lefferts highlights that Microsoft has ranked number one in modern endpoint security market share third year in a row.

Continuing a bit of a trend from this year, here are some great examples of Agentic AI in Healthcare. And finally, an interesting look at Why Databricks Is Worth $100 Billion.

#528 - 17th August 2025

2025-08-17T00:00:00.00Z

First up, there's a big announcement from The OneLake Team - Costs simplified: lowering capacity utilization when accessing OneLake - essentially all the value of OneLake for the same price as Azure Storage. No matter how data is read or written, transaction costs match Azure Storage; if you use a Fabric capacity reservation, storage transactions are even cheaper—40% less than Azure Storage.

In AI, Agent Factory: The new era of agentic AI - common use cases and design patterns - Microsoft's Agent Factory introduces five foundational patterns for building production-ready agentic AI—tool use, reflection, planning, multi-agent collaboration, and ReAct reasoning—marking a critical shift from RAG-based information retrieval to agents that autonomously execute complex enterprise workflows. Navigating AI Adoption: Legal Considerations Every Organization Should Know - Microsoft's comprehensive whitepaper on legal considerations for AI adoption provides organisations with a strategic roadmap covering data privacy, cybersecurity, operational governance, intellectual property risks, and practical implementation guidance—positioning legal and privacy teams as essential architects of responsible AI deployment rather than mere compliance gatekeepers. Finally, a great talk from Code Europe 2025 about Getting Started with Azure AI Foundry Agent Service.

In Cloud Native, first up there's an announcement about Azure Linux with OS Guard: Immutable Container Host with Code Integrity and Open Source Transparency - that enforces code integrity through kernel-level verification, dm-verity protected volumes, and mandatory access control—essentially creating a tamper-proof foundation for cloud-native workloads whilst maintaining full open-source transparency and upstream contribution commitments. Two other posts of note: Connecting to a Private AKS Cluster with Azure Bastion - No Jump Box Needed and Private Pod Subnets in AKS Without Overlay Networking.

Finally a couple of interesing blog posts about more advanced use cases of Entra ID: Lifecycle Workflows with Entra ID and Entra API-Driven Inbound Provisioning.

#527 - 10th August 2025

2025-08-10T00:00:00.00Z

There are a large number of AKS GA / Public / Private Preview announcements - check out the "Containers" section for more info. Obviously the biggest announcement this week is the launch of GTP5 and Microsoft's announcement of GPT-5's general availability in Azure AI Foundry. Initial community feedback about GTP5 has been mixed, but my assumption is that people need more time to understand how to adapt to use the new model and understand its capabilities. The GTP-5 announcement has slightly overshadowed the gpt-oss release - OpenAI's opensource model: gpt-oss on Azure AI Foundry and Windows AI Foundry. I had the 20b parameter version running on my Surface Laptop Studio 2 this week via Ollama and it seemed to perform well.

An interesting announcement this week is Wassette: WebAssembly-based tools for AI agents. This hands-on introduction to Wassette brilliantly demonstrates how the future of AI agents isn't about pre-loading them with every possible capability, but rather teaching them to be resourceful—fetching and executing tools as needed whilst maintaining strict security boundaries. The tutorial's progression from simple time-telling components to network-enabled tools showcases the thoughtful permission system at work, where even compromised components can't exfiltrate data without explicit user consent—a refreshing approach to the wild west of AI tool integration.

There's a useful blog about Replacing SendGrid Free Tier with Azure Communication Services for Emails via SMTP - with SendGrid's free tier disappearing in May 2025, many developers are discovering Azure Communication Services offers a surprisingly elegant alternative—particularly for those small-scale applications that only need to send occasional transactional emails. The migration journey, whilst initially daunting with its Microsoft Entra App registration requirements and SMTP authentication complexities, actually reveals ACS's thoughtful pay-as-you-go model that better aligns with real-world usage patterns than fixed-tier pricing ever could.

Finally, I managed to write a short LinkedIn post about reaching the 10 year MVP milestone and thanked the various Microsoft Product Group Teams who have been so helpful over the years and the MVP community who are, and continue to be an inspiration.

#526 - 3rd August 2025

2025-08-03T00:00:00.00Z

It's an exceptionally AI / Agent focused week. To start off - Microsoft's roundtable at Identiverse 2025 brought together 149 identity professionals who concluded that AI agents are exposing existing IAM vulnerabilities whilst driving urgent needs for new authentication frameworks, governance models, and agent-specific identity standards—challenges Microsoft aims to address through its upcoming Entra Agent ID capabilities: AI agents and the future of identity: What's on the minds of your peers. This tutorial demonstrates how to implement end-to-end user authorisation for MCP servers using Entra ID's on-behalf-of flows, enabling tools to access backend services like Azure AI Search whilst maintaining the original user's identity context—though the author notes that simpler API approaches may suffice for many enterprise scenarios - End-to-end authorization with Entra ID and MCP. Next, Fueling the Agentic Web Revolution with NLWeb and PostgreSQL - Microsoft's NLWeb project now integrates with PostgreSQL and pgvector, enabling developers to transform any website into an AI-powered conversational interface or Model Context Protocol server using familiar database infrastructure—advancing Microsoft's vision of an "open agentic web" where autonomous agents seamlessly interact with web content.

The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon seems to be in full effect as n8n seems to be mentioned everywhere I look and it's the topic of this week's Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast: A look at agentic workflows with n8n. The latest Azure Essentials Show episode features Clayton Siemens demonstrating how to apply the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework—reliability, security, cost optimisation, operational excellence, and performance efficiency—specifically to AI workloads, emphasising the unique challenges of experimental mindset, ethical AI practices, and proactive model decay management: Design AI Workloads with the Azure Well-Architected Framework.

Copilot in Azure explained - Microsoft's Copilot in Azure, now generally available and free across Portal, CLI, and Mobile App, serves as an AI-powered assistant that respects existing RBAC permissions whilst helping users author Resource Graph queries, analyse costs, deploy infrastructure, and manage resources—all without retaining session memory for enhanced security. In AI-powered exam dashboard, Guy Gregory built an AI-powered exam timeline dashboard using GitHub Models for next-exam recommendations, GitHub Actions for automated transcript extraction from Microsoft Learn, and Azure Static Web Apps for deployment—demonstrating practical "Continuous AI" integration in under 30 minutes of initial development.

Microsoft's GA release of Bicep templates for Entra ID resources eliminates the need to orchestrate between separate deployment mechanisms, allowing developers to declare both Azure and Entra ID resources (like applications and groups) in the same Bicep files using the new Microsoft Graph Bicep extension, complete with VS Code IntelliSense support and federated identity scenarios - GA of Bicep templates support for Microsoft Entra ID resources. And finally, an epic read as usual - the Fabric July 2025 Feature Summary.

#525 - 27th July 2025

2025-07-27T00:00:00.00Z

Mark Russinovich shared an update about Project Flash: Advancing Azure Virtual Machine availability monitoring - Microsoft's Project Flash has introduced significant enhancements to Azure VM availability monitoring, including a new dimension that distinguishes between platform-triggered and user-initiated disruptions, enabling more precise root cause analysis and faster response times. The update also features integration with Azure Monitor alerts through Event Grid, providing real-time notifications via SMS, email, and push notifications—capabilities. A boon for organizations looking to improve their VM reliability and performance.

Microsoft Sentinel has unveiled a fully managed data lake that enables security teams to cost-effectively store and analyse all their security data in one place, eliminating data silos whilst supporting retrospective threat hunting and forensics across 350+ data sources: Introducing Microsoft Sentinel data lake. The solution offers flexible pricing that separates data ingestion from analytics consumption, complemented by new tools including a Visual Studio Code extension for Python-based analysis and scheduled jobs—making advanced security analytics accessible without complex infrastructure management. See this post for more details: Microsoft Sentinel data lake: Unify signals, cut costs, and power agentic AI.

There's a useful post What models can I use for free while prototyping - Microsoft's AI Toolkit now provides developers with free access to GitHub-hosted models for prototyping AI agents, offering an ideal starting point despite rate limits, with a pay-as-you-go option available for scaling up. Alternatively, developers seeking unlimited usage can run local models through tools like Ollama or Foundary Local, with the AI Toolkit seamlessly supporting both options directly within Visual Studio Code for easy experimentation and agent building.

Important Changes to App Service Managed Certificates: Is Your Certificate Affected - Azure App Service Managed Certificates will require public site accessibility and specific Traffic Manager configurations starting July 28, 2025, due to new industry validation requirements, potentially affecting certificate renewals for sites with restricted access or using nested endpoints and *.trafficmanager.net domains.

Finally, a guide to Supercharge Your Dev Containers on Windows - cloning repositories directly into the WSL filesystem rather than mounting from Windows transforms Dev Container performance by eliminating the cross-OS network protocol bottleneck, turning sluggish I/O operations into near-native Linux speeds—a simple yet game-changing optimisation for Windows developers, and Writing structured data to SharePoint from Synapse Notebooks - this guide demonstrates how to overcome Synapse's lack of native SharePoint write support by using Python notebooks with Microsoft Graph API authentication to write various file types—from CSV data to matplotlib visualisations—directly to SharePoint, filling a critical gap in many data platform architectures.

#524 - 20th July 2025

2025-07-20T00:00:00.00Z

AI Agents are starting to cross the chasm from ideas to reality. There are two interesting posts from Geert Baeke: Deploying AI Foundry Agents and Azure Container Apps to support an Agent2Agent solution and Deploying a multi-agent solution with MCP and A2A to Azure Container Apps. Alli Parrett shares some useful guidance in Introducing Copilot Memory: A More Productive and Personalized AI for the Way You Work and Leo Visser has written a thoughful post - Why your AI might be biased (and what you can do about it).

Elton Stoneman publishes 10 Essential Claude Code Tips: Boost Your AI Coding Productivity in 2025 - I've been using Claude Code (Max) for the last month and completely agree with Elton's statement that his journey was: mildly sceptical to pleasantly surprised to thoroughly impressed to cannot live without. While I'm working on this edition of Azure Weekly, Claude Code running in a VS Code instance working on an idea I had last night for a new tool. It's currently in a performance improvement feedback loop, writing benchmarks and using the results to re-write the code to run faster and reduce memory allocations. Really awesome stuff.

There have been a number of Microsoft Fabric and OneLake announcements this week: Unified by design: mirroring Azure Databricks Unity Catalog to Microsoft OneLake in Fabric Generally Available, and Accelerating Insights from Unstructured Text with AI Powered OneLake Shortcut Transformations, and User Data Functions now support async functions and pandas DataFrame, Series types, and the third part in the series from James Broome Reading structured data from SharePoint in Synapse Notebooks, and Carmel Eve has published a Introduction to the Medallion Architecture talk.

#523 - 13th July 2025

2025-07-13T00:00:00.00Z

In Azure AI developments, see the new Deep Research in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service for enhanced AI capabilities. Joe Filcik asks: what if you could cut AI costs by 60% without losing quality? - Running through the new cost model for Azure AI Content Understanding. Konstantinos Passadis runs through building an AI Assistant for Microsoft Learn Docs MCP. And, Tim Meyers discusses listening at scale: using Gen AI to understand 10,000 voices.

As we highlighted last week, the new shortcut transformations in Microsoft Fabric allow you to keep data fully in-sync. Here, Miquella de Boer runs through some more concrete examples of usage. You can now Access your Delta Lake tables as Iceberg automatically in OneLake (Preview), and Carmel Eve has recorded a short talk How does Delta Lake work?.

Joseph Guadagno discusses how to simplify your .NET development with Aspire. We used Aspire as part of a recent project and found it incredibly useful for managing development of multi-part solutions. you can learn how to build an AI-powered, unified SOC in a new Microsoft e-book!

And finally, this week I was renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the 10th year in a row. For some reason, I was only renewed under the .NET category and not for Azure, which is slightly puzzling, but ho hum! I'm very pleased to have reached this milestone, and especially as Azure Weekly is heading towards its 11th anniversary in November.

#522 - 6th July 2025

2025-07-06T00:00:00.00Z

In Microsoft Fabric (and related data architectures) - see the new Shortcut Transformations: from files to Delta tables. On the endjin YouTube channel, Carmel answers the question: What is a Data Lakehouse? And, more in healthcare analytics: Integrating remote patient monitoring solutions with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.

On the Azure blog, Maria Bledsoe discusses building secure, scalable AI in the cloud with Microsoft Azure. And finally, an announcement of the general Availability of Microsoft Purview SDK and APIs!

#521 - 29th June 2025

2025-06-29T00:00:00.00Z

There's lots of great Fabric content this week: Data engineers will be interested in the new Inline Scalar user-defined functions (UDFs) in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse (Preview). Developers can explore new capabilities with the features for Microsoft Fabric Extension in VS Code. The Fabric Data Agent has received an upgrade with Data source instructions for smarter, more accurate AI responses, and there's a comprehensive Fabric June 2025 Feature Summary which covers all the latest additions.

On the infrastructure side, there's practical guidance for Deploying an MCP Server Using Azure Container Apps. Here Microsoft is recognised for innovation, scale, and real-world impact with Serverless Compute on Azure. As you may know, we here at endjin are passionate about the ability of serverless compute to give small, medium and enterprise organisations a low resistance path to adoption!

For those working with data integration, James has provides an excellent walkthrough of reading structured data from SharePoint in Synapse Pipelines. Finally, Microsoft's commitment to security architecture is highlighted in Microsoft's journey towards durability at scale with Mark Russinovich.

#520 - 22nd June 2025

2025-06-22T00:00:00.00Z

Firstly, in AI tooling, Visual Studio developers will be pleased to know that Agent mode is now generally available with MCP support, here's a detailed walkthrough on Building an MCP Server for Microsoft Learn. Ian Griffiths has recorded a short talk: AI Hallucinations Explained: Why It's Not a Bug but a Feature, and the MVP community has provided an In-Depth Guide on SharePoint Content AI.

Microsoft Fabric continues to announce new features with MCP Support for Real-Time Intelligence (RTI). On the database front, Azure SQL Database users also have something new to explore with Data Virtualization for Azure SQL Database (Public Preview). James Broome has written a guide to Synapse & Service Principal SharePoint Integration. For Azure administrators, there's excellent practical content on Mastering Azure Resource Graph: Query & Analyse Tags with KQL.

For those working in healthcare data management, there's an important piece on how to Store and Retrieve Healthcare AI Insights at Scale in Healthcare Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric, and there's some valuable guidance on how to Find skill-building volunteer opportunities with Microsoft Copilot!

Finally, earlier in the year a series of enthusiastic posts about NATS on Bluesky by yours truly, caught the attention of Tech Journalist Mary Branscombe and inspired her to write a piece for The Stack on the topic: NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all. The site is free, but you need to create an account to read the article. Mary's other articles are also worth reading - her article about Flatcar is especially good - I had spent weeks doing research about it and her article contained more information and was far better written than my research notes!

#519 - 15th June 2025

2025-06-15T00:00:00.00Z

This week, ending what has been a 12 year journey (with much of their content being shared here in Azure Weekly!), here's the final episode of the Azure Podcast. The hosts all get together to share anecdotes, and discuss how the Azure space has changed over the years.

Elsewhere, on the Fabric blog, RK Iyer runs through an example of PII detection and anonymization with PySpark and the Azure Incubations team is proud to share that Drasi has been accepted into CNCF sandbox for change-driven solutions.

There's a useful post about Azure Verified Modules: Support Statement & Target Response Times Update, Simona Liao announces that next edit suggestions are now available in Visual Studio, and Mindy Rosenthal highlights the new Data and AI courses and updates, the next iteration on Microsoft Learn.

Finally there's a great post on Understanding the Total Cost of Ownership of Cloud. We've written a series of posts about TCO: What is it?, How to calculate it, Putting it into action, and finally A simple toolkit for IT budgeting and planning.

#518 - 8th June 2025

2025-06-08T00:00:00.00Z

A good blend of articles this week. First up in AI: The Supercomputer that runs ChatGPT, Sora & DeepSeek on Azure, and Technical Deep Dive and Q&A on Foundry Local - LLMs on device, a Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast episode about The Dawn of Agent IDs in Entra ID, and an example of using Foundation Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Dermatology.

In Data & Analytics: Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.5 (Preview) (while also saying you should start to think about migrating to Microsoft Fabric), and a useful guide to Teaching Python with GitHub Codespaces (Dev Containers FTW!).

Other articles of interest: Azure Availability Sets vs. Availability Zones: Which Should You Use? Host Remote MCP Servers on App Service: Updated samples now with new languages and auth support, and What's new in FinOps toolkit – May 2025.

Finally, following MS Build two weeks ago, here are a few more round-ups of the conference: All the news from Microsoft Build 2025 on the MS IT Pro podcast all the Azure news you don't want to miss from Microsoft Build from Alysa Taylor and Greg Suttie's Takeaways from this years conference.

#517 - 1st June 2025

2025-06-01T00:00:00.00Z

A post-BUILD edition filled with a number of in-depth articles! In AI: The future of AI agents—and why OAuth must evolve, a really good explainer - A visual introduction to vector embeddings, a demo (with code available) about Building Intelligent Data Agents: Unleashing NL2SQL with Semantic Kernel, and a complete example (also with code available) - Introducing Azure AI Travel Agents: A Flagship MCP-Powered Sample for AI Travel Solutions.

Other articles of note: Throughput Testing at Scale for Azure Functions, and Using Azure Service Groups in an Enterprise-Scale Landing Zone, a useful guide to Understanding Idle Usage in Azure Container Apps, and a useful clarification on .NET Aspire & Dapr: What are they and how they complement each other when building distributed applications.

#516 - 25th May 2025

2025-05-25T00:00:00.00Z

With Microsoft Build this week, we have another bumper issue featuring tonnes of exciting announcements. Check out the MSBuild "Book of News" to get a high-level overview of what's been going on! Here are some of the highlights:

AI and Agentic Innovation

As expected, there have been a huge amount of AI-related announcements - here Chris Paoli describes how Microsoft have unveiled a secure, scalable future for AI Agents.

We have been excited to see more announcements in the open technology space - as we are firm believers in open-source as a driver of innovation. Check out NLWeb, an open project which aims to help users create natural language interfaces for websites. And the new Model Context Protocol, which provides new open standards for connecting agentic workflows to different data sources. If you want to know more, Lee Stott describes how you can kickstart your AI development with this course on the subject! And you also have the ability to run models locally with the public preview of Foundry Local for on-device AI.

The announcement of Microsoft Discovery at build is an exciting development in using agentic AI to accelerate scientific research and development.

Azure AI Foundry continues to evolve, with new models and support for agents. There is also a new Azure AI Foundry Developer Community to connect developers in this space.

There are some exciting domain-specific solutions being developed, such as the Healthcare Agent Orchestrator, and Voice-enabled AI Agents for increasing customer engagement.

Data and Analytics

There have been some great announcements around Microsoft Fabric, including Mirroring innovations, New Shortcut Types for Azure Blob Storage, Cosmos DB integration, Digital Twin Builder, and Warehouse Snapshots.

See the Fabric Feature Summary for a good overview!

Related to these announcements, learn about how to simplify you Medallion Implementation with Materialized Lake Views (for more information about the Medallion Architecture check out this blog). And, for a great example of using the real-time analytics features in fabric check out this example!

There has also been a raft of CosmosDB updates, including: Azure Cosmos DB fleets, Fuzzy text search for NoSQL, and integration in Azure AI Agent Service.

Additionally, in cross-cloud analytics, Amazon S3 in Unity Catalog on Azure Databricks is now generally available..

Developer Tools

In big news, the Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source!

The Fabric CLI is generally available. There have been improvements in connecting to private NuGet feeds.

There has been additional support around Copilot and code generation with the general availability of GitHub Copilot for Azure and Natural Language App Code Generation.

Support for Aspire on Azure App Service has been announced in preview, extending what is already a useful tool for managing multi-part applications.

Here is a summary of all the Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell updates at Build.

Data Governance and Monitoring

Check out "everything new in Management and Governance" for a roundup of all of the Build announcements in this space. An interesting addition is the new Smarter Troubleshooting in Azure Monitor which allows AI-powered investigation of issues.

Keep reading to hear about all of this and more!

#515 - 18th May 2025

2025-05-18T00:00:00.00Z

Microsoft Build 2025 runs this week from the 19th - 22nd May. Remember you can Register for free to attend online, and check out How to Watch Microsoft Build 2025 Online and MVPs Recommended Microsoft Build 2025 Session for some recommended sessions to watch.

Other highlights this week include: the start of an interesting series about Getting Started with Semantic Kernel Part 1 and Part 2, and Natural Language to SQL Semantic Kernel Multi-Agent System; "Natural Language to" is a topic I'm particularly interested in, and gave a talk and demo about it this week, showing how to combine structured output, function calling, and MCP. Microsoft Fabric Data Agents have NL2DAX and NL2KQL capabilities - I'm very interested to see how this will space evolve.

Two interesting announcements this week: Native Azure Functions Support in Azure Container Apps, and Launched Generally Available: App Service Webjobs on Linux, and two interesing posts: Azure CycleCloud + Slurm: A Beginners Guide to Job Submission, and Testing IaC Bicep with Microsoft Symphony.

Finally, Carmel Eve is investigating data platform architectures in: What is a Data Lakehouse? and How do Data Lakehouses Work? An Intro to Delta Lake.

#514 - 11th May 2025

2025-05-11T00:00:00.00Z

Another quiet week, but there are still a few interesting articles. Highlights for this week include: Empowering multi-agent apps with the open Agent2Agent A2A protocol, hopefully this will have as big an impact as MCP, which is the focus of: Plug, Play, and Prey: The security risks of the Model Context Protocol. In Azure Storage there's a new feature: Unlock seamless data management with Azure Storage Actions - now generally available.

In Analytics: OneLake Shortcut cache and on-prem gateway support Generally Available, and Microsoft Fabric Continuous Integration maturity levels. Two other announcements of note: Azure Arc: Keep your Azure Connected Machine agent up-to-date on a Windows Server, and Catch Up on the Azure Communication Services Fundamentals Series.

Finally, if you've not seen this before, take a look at Microsoft's Virtual Datacenter Tour opens a door to the cloud.

#513 - 4th May 2025

2025-05-04T00:00:00.00Z

We're in the pre-BUILD 2025 lull, but there are still a large number of announcements and in depth articles. To kick off, One year of Phi: Small language models making big leaps in AI, and Azure Compute Fleet is Generally Available, and Azure Functions - Learnings from executing PowerShell from C#.

In Analytics, there are two good Fabric articles from the community: Automate testing Microsoft Fabric Data Pipelines with YAML Pipelines, and Microsoft Fabric RTI: Azure Event Grid Namespace MQTT support.

In Cloud Native, there are two interesting posts about networking advancements: What's New in the World of eBPF from Azure Container Networking, and Introducing Layer 7 Network Policies with Advanced Container Networking Services for AKS Clusters, and a detailed guide to ArgoCD integration with Private AKS Cluster.

Finally, Barry Smart has written a great in-depth 3 part series on DuckDB - where he makes the case that if you deal with data of the ~1 billion rows magnitude, you might be better served using the high-performance, in-process analytics engine, rather than a full-blown cloud data platform. Part 1 is DuckDB: the Rise of In-Process Analytics and Data Singularity, Part 2 is DuckDB in Depth: How It Works and What Makes It Fast, Part 3 is DuckDB in Practice: Enterprise Integration and Architectural Patterns, and the code samples are available on GitHub. It's about a 30 minute read, but essential if you do any data engineering work, and want to improve the speed of your inner-dev-loop.

#512 - 27th April 2025

2025-04-27T00:00:00.00Z

Apologies for the lack of a newsletter last week, I was making the most of the lovely weather over the Easter break, so there's a bumped editions this week. First up, in Analytics, there are a number of Microsoft Fabric updates, including that the FabCon Las Vegas keynote recording now available. Other highlights include: Build data-driven agents with curated data from OneLake, and Microsoft Fabric RTI:Azure Data Explorer CDC support, and Automate testing Microsoft Fabric Data Pipelines with Azure DevOps, and Creating Quality Gates in the Medallion Architecture with Pandera.

In AI, there are a couple of posts of interest: o3 and o4-mini: Unlock enterprise agent workflows with next-level reasoning AI with Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, and Introducing MAI-DS-R1 (a new open weights DeepSeek R1 model variant, developed by Microsoft AI).

Finally, other interesting articles this week include: Processing SFTP Events with Azure Function and Event Hub and Azure Container Registry Continuous Patching for Security, and Azure Deployment Stacks: Zero to Hero.

#511 - 13th April 2025

2025-04-13T00:00:00.00Z

Welcome to Issue 511 of the Azure Weekly Newsletter. This week Microsoft Copilot in Azure is Now Generally Available. Model Context Protocol (MCP) seems to be the hot topic of the week, with several interesting articles on the subject: Host remote MCP servers in Azure Container Apps, and a guide to Sending Emails with MCP and Azure Communication Services, an interesting how-to: Using an MCP Server in GitHub Copilot, and Azure API Management Your Auth Gateway For MCP Servers.

Even in 2025, almost every data & analytics project we do involves a data source via SFTP, so it's great to see continuing investments in this fundamental service: Azure Blob Storage SFTP: General Availability of ACLs Access Control Lists of local users, and a there's also a nice tutorial about Performing Simple SFTP Operations on Azure Blob Storage using CURL Commands, and a useful Azure Files Storage and Access Tiers: A Comprehensive Guide.

In Data and Analytics: Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, Optimizing for CI/CD in Microsoft Fabric, and Operationalize fabric-cicd to work with Microsoft Fabric and GitHub Actions.

Finally, three interesting articles worth a read: Synthetic Monitoring in Application Insights Using Playwright: A Game-Changer, General-Purpose vs Reasoning Models in Azure OpenAI, and Azure Training Maps.

#510 - 6th April 2025

2025-04-06T00:00:00.00Z

Two big conferences happened this week: FabCon in Las Vegas, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London, as you can imagine the content this week is heavily slanted towards the announcement from those events. Here are the highlights of the Fabric announcements (many more in the Analytics section:) Copilot and AI Capabilities are now accessible to all paid SKUs in Microsoft Fabric, and The next evolution of OneLake security Preview, and What's new with OneLake shortcuts, and Exciting New Features for Mirroring for Azure SQL in Fabric, and Mirroring in Fabric - What's new, and Microsoft Fabric RTI:Data Agent conversations on real-time telemetry.

My colleagues Barry Smart and & Ed Freeman from endjin were at FabCon and have posted some daily summaries of the event on LinkedIn. Barry's Pre-Con Day 1, Day 1, and Day 2. Ed's Day 1, and Day 2.

There are a large number of announcements from KubeCon (check out the Containers and Networking sections for more details), but the most noteworthy to me is that Azure Linux 3.0 now Generally Available with Azure Kubernetes Service v1.32. Other Cloud Native related highlights this week, include: Configure time-based scaling in Azure Container Apps, and AKS networking made easy: Your comprehensive guide, and Application Gateway for Containers: a not-so-gentle intro 4.

Other interesting articles this week, include: Azure Bicep optional module names explained, and Trusted Signing Public Preview Update, and finally: Hyperlight Wasm: Azure Goes the Final Wasi Mile

#509 - 30th March 2025

2025-03-30T00:00:00.00Z

An AI heavy editions this week! In AI: Unleashing the Power of Model Context Protocol MCP: A Game-Changer in AI Integration, and Best Practices for Requesting Quota Increase for Azure OpenAI Models, and Building a multimodal, multi-agent system using Azure AI Agent Service and OpenAI Agent SDK. There are also two posts About Responses API: Agentic P2P Automation: Harnessing the Power of OpenAI's Responses API and a set of samples: Responses API on Azure OpenAI.

In Azure Infrastructure there are two interesting posts: Subnet Peering and From zero to hero: Mastering storage in Azure Kubernetes Service AKS. Finally, one technology I'm particularly interested in gets an update: Hyperlight Wasm: Fast, secure, and OS-free.