Azure Weekly

Issue #528 - 17th August 2025

First up, there's a big announcement from The OneLake Team - Costs simplified: lowering capacity utilization when accessing OneLake - essentially all the value of OneLake for the same price as Azure Storage. No matter how data is read or written, transaction costs match Azure Storage; if you use a Fabric capacity reservation, storage transactions are even cheaper—40% less than Azure Storage.

In AI, Agent Factory: The new era of agentic AI - common use cases and design patterns - Microsoft's Agent Factory introduces five foundational patterns for building production-ready agentic AI—tool use, reflection, planning, multi-agent collaboration, and ReAct reasoning—marking a critical shift from RAG-based information retrieval to agents that autonomously execute complex enterprise workflows. Navigating AI Adoption: Legal Considerations Every Organization Should Know - Microsoft's comprehensive whitepaper on legal considerations for AI adoption provides organisations with a strategic roadmap covering data privacy, cybersecurity, operational governance, intellectual property risks, and practical implementation guidance—positioning legal and privacy teams as essential architects of responsible AI deployment rather than mere compliance gatekeepers. Finally, a great talk from Code Europe 2025 about Getting Started with Azure AI Foundry Agent Service.

In Cloud Native, first up there's an announcement about Azure Linux with OS Guard: Immutable Container Host with Code Integrity and Open Source Transparency - that enforces code integrity through kernel-level verification, dm-verity protected volumes, and mandatory access control—essentially creating a tamper-proof foundation for cloud-native workloads whilst maintaining full open-source transparency and upstream contribution commitments. Two other posts of note: Connecting to a Private AKS Cluster with Azure Bastion - No Jump Box Needed and Private Pod Subnets in AKS Without Overlay Networking.

Finally a couple of interesing blog posts about more advanced use cases of Entra ID: Lifecycle Workflows with Entra ID and Entra API-Driven Inbound Provisioning.