Azure Weekly

Issue #511 - 13th April 2025

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.