Azure Weekly

Issue #508 - 23rd March 2025

Quite a packed issue with announcements or articles in just about every category. In AI the highlights this week include: Conversational AI applications with Azure Communication Services and the Azure OpenAI Realtime API, Managing the cost of AI: Leveraging the FinOps Framework, an interesting real-world use case Building an Intelligent Document Processor with Azure Functions, and something I'm excited about as I was tinkering with it this week: Model Context Protocol MCP: Integrating Azure OpenAI for Enhanced Tool Integration and Prompting and an official MCP .NET SDK has just been released..

In Compute; ACA continues to be awesome with the announcement of GA for Azure Container Apps Serverless GPUs. Hibernation is now Generally Available on GPU VMs, and there's the public preview launch of Azure Functions durable task scheduler - which looks like a really interesting service.

Finally, there are two articles which distracted me from finishing the newsletter: The Deployment of Hollow Core Fiber HCF in Azures Network, and Building a DeepSeek Extension for GitHub Copilot in VS Code