Azure Weekly

Issue #526 - 3rd August 2025

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.