Azure Weekly

Issue #538 - 2nd November 2025

I'm sure most of you are aware of the Azure Outage that occurred last week (following on from AWS the week before); Massive Azure outage is over, but problems linger - here's what happened - Microsoft's Azure cloud platform experienced a major eight-hour outage caused by an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door, affecting services like Microsoft 365, Xbox Live, and numerous customer applications across multiple regions before being resolved. As ever Is It DNS?

There's a nice new feature which should help production workloads: Public Preview: Azure Functions zero-downtime deployments with rolling updates in Flex Consumption - Azure Functions now enables zero-downtime deployments in the Flex Consumption plan through rolling updates, allowing code and configuration changes to be applied gradually across instances without interrupting function execution. In Analytics, it's time for the Fabric October 2025 Feature Summary - Microsoft Fabric's October update introduced enhanced security features including Outbound Access Protection and Workspace-Level Private Link, smarter data engineering capabilities like Adaptive Target File Size, and new integrations such as Data Agent in Lakehouse to streamline workflows and strengthen governance. There's also teh announcement of The open-source release of Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code - Microsoft released the Fabric Core extension for Visual Studio Code as open source on GitHub, providing developers with foundational capabilities for authentication, workspace management, and Git integration to build Fabric solutions directly in VS Code.

In AI: Simplify Search Development with the New Azure AI Search Wizard - Azure AI Search introduced an enhanced "Import Data" wizard that unifies keyword search, RAG, and multimodal workflows into a streamlined interface, supporting integrated vectorization, semantic ranking, and expanded data source options for faster index creation. There's also the Public Preview: AI Toolkit for GitHub Copilot Prompt-First Agent Development - The AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code now supports prompt-first AI agent development with GitHub Copilot, enabling developers to build, trace, and evaluate agents using natural language and the Microsoft Agent Framework without complex orchestration setup. I've been having some good results with SLM's: Understanding Small Language Modes - Small Language Models are compact, efficient alternatives to large language models that run directly on edge devices, offering faster responses, enhanced privacy, and reduced resource consumption while maintaining AI capabilities for everyday tasks.

And finally, Level up your Python + AI skills with our complete series - Microsoft released a comprehensive nine-part educational series covering Python AI development, including topics like LLMs, RAG, vision models, structured outputs, tool calling, AI agents, and the Model Context Protocol with free models available through GitHub.