Azure Weekly

Issue #539 - 9th November 2025

We're heading towards Microsoft Ignite 2025, which means announcements are starting to appear ahead of the event: ArcGIS GeoAnalytics for Microsoft Fabric Spark (GA) - Microsoft and Esri launched ArcGIS GeoAnalytics for Microsoft Fabric Spark in general availability, bringing over 180 spatial analytics functions directly into Fabric's data science and engineering workloads for high-speed geospatial data integration, transformation, and analysis at scale. General Availability of Larger Container Sizes on Azure Container Instances - Azure Container Instances now supports larger container sizes with up to 31 vCPU and 240 GB memory for standard containers, enabling enhanced performance for data-intensive workloads, high-performance computing, and collaborative analytics without infrastructure management.

There are a couple of MCP related updated: Build and Host an Expense Tracking MCP Server with Azure Functions - Azure Functions now supports experimental preview triggers and bindings for creating remote Model Context Protocol servers with server-sent events, enabling developers to build AI agent tools that scale automatically with key-based access control and optional network isolation. Azure MCP Server (GA) - Azure MCP Server reached general availability with version 1.0, providing a standards-based bridge between AI agents and over 40 Azure services through the Model Context Protocol, with enhanced security, performance optimizations, and support for Docker deployment.

If you're planning to attend or watch remotely: Database Innovations: Your Guide to Microsoft Ignite 2025 - Microsoft Ignite 2025 (November 18-21) features comprehensive database sessions covering SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, and Fabric Databases, with announcements on AI integration, migration tools, and real-world customer implementations.

In AI: Custom Agents Lead Microsoft AI Roadmap for Visual Studio - Microsoft's November AI roadmap for Visual Studio introduces user-created custom agents, Test and Debugger agents, GPT-5 Codex integration, concurrent agent execution, and enhanced Model Context Protocol support to transform the IDE into a fully AI-powered development environment. Use Python library for the OpenAI APIs to access GPT-5 model on Azure OpenAI Service behind Azure API Management - Developers can access GPT-5 reasoning models on Azure OpenAI Service using the standard OpenAI Python library by configuring the AzureOpenAI class with appropriate endpoints and authentication, with support for features like reasoning effort settings and developer messages.

And finally When the Cloud Falls: Understanding the AWS and Azure Outages of October 2025 - This podcast episode examines the major AWS and Azure outages that occurred in October 2025, discussing what happened, the impact on services, and lessons learned about cloud infrastructure reliability and dependency on major providers.