Azure Weekly

Issue #532 - 21st September 2025

FabCon Europe 2025 was held in Vienna this week, and there was a firehose of announcements, which for non-attendees are nicely covered in the epic Fabric September 2025 Feature Summary. Also in the analytics space there's an interesting New Microsoft Purview Deployment Blueprint Lightweight guide to mitigate data leakage - A practical deployment blueprint following a good/better/best model that helps organizations quickly enable data security features across Microsoft 365 based on licensing tiers.

Highlights from all the AI posts this week: Beyond the Black Box: See Inside AI's Performance with AI Toolkit - AI Toolkit's tracing capabilities help developers monitor and debug LLM applications by tracking model interactions, token usage, and performance metrics using OpenTelemetry Protocol. Beyond OAuth: Why SCIM must evolve for the AI agent revolution - SCIM protocol needs evolution to handle AI agent identities with agent-specific schemas, event-driven provisioning, and capability management for the autonomous agent ecosystem. Join Us for a Technical Deep Dive and Q&A on Foundry Local - LLMs on device - Foundry Local team hosts an AMA session about their on-device AI inference solution that enables running LLMs locally with model customization and seamless Azure AI Foundry scaling. Building AI Apps with the Foundry Local C# SDK - Foundry Local C# SDK enables .NET developers to run AI models locally with automatic bootstrap, model management, and OpenAI-compatible APIs for offline, low-latency applications.

There have been a number of noteworthy AKS announcements: AKS Automatic with Azure Linux - AKS Automatic reaches general availability, running on Azure Linux by default to simplify Kubernetes cluster management with automated node management, scaling, and security. Introducing Image Customizer for Azure Linux - An open-source tool that enables direct customization of Azure Linux images without VMs, making the process faster, more reliable, and easier to integrate into CI/CD pipelines. Introducing WireGuard In-Transit Encryption for AKS Public Preview - WireGuard-based encryption now available in AKS public preview, providing transparent encryption for inter-node pod traffic with automatic key management. Finally, there's a fascinating article which covers Microsoft's adoption of Rust (including Hyperlight) - Microsoft Goes All-in on Rust for Core Infrastructure and Much More - Microsoft is systematically replacing C++ with Rust in critical systems including Windows, Azure, and cryptographic libraries, while developing AI-powered code translation tools.