Azure Weekly

Issue #516 - 25th May 2025

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!