Azure Weekly

Issue #527 - 10th August 2025

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.