Azure Weekly

Issue #546 - 11th January 2026

After a two-week break, we're back with our first newsletter of 2026. Some highlights from this edition:
Context Engineering Lessons from Building Azure SRE Agent – Microsoft's team discovered that consolidating 100+ narrow tools into 5 wide ones and focusing on context engineering—not model upgrades—was the key to building reliable autonomous site reliability agents.
Context Engineering with Microsoft Agent Framework's Context Provider API – A practical guide to building context-aware agents using the Context Provider API, demonstrating patterns for managing both short-term thread memory and long-term semantic memory across conversations.
The Future of Software Engineering – Jeffrey Palermo talks with Scott Hanselman about how AI is reshaping software engineering practices and development workflows.
You Can't Debug What You Can't See - AI Observability with OpenTelemetry + Microsoft Foundry – A deep technical walkthrough on implementing end-to-end tracing and evaluation for AI agents in production, making nondeterministic agent behavior visible and debuggable.
First look at Fabric Ontology – An exploration of Microsoft Fabric Ontology, showing how to combine static context data with real-time telemetry to create queryable digital twin models accessible through natural language.
Explore Fabric Security insights in the OneLake catalog – Govern tab – Security insights from Microsoft Purview Hub are transitioning to the new Admin Report in the OneLake Catalog's Govern tab, providing unified governance data where your data lives.
General Availability of Mirroring Azure Database for PostgreSQL in Microsoft Fabric – Fabric Mirroring for PostgreSQL is now GA with enterprise features including Entra ID authentication, VNET support, and high availability for near real-time analytics without ETL.
Real-Time Intelligence with Microsoft Fabric & IoT – MVP Dominick Raimato demonstrates hands-on real-time intelligence using Raspberry Pi devices and Microsoft Fabric, making complex data concepts tangible and interactive.
Automated Code Reviews in Azure DevOps using OpenAI models powered by Microsoft Foundry – A step-by-step guide to creating an AI-powered code reviewer for Azure DevOps pull requests, using structured outputs from GPT models to post inline comments at exact line numbers.
How to Create and Deploy a Diabetes Prediction Model in Azure – A comprehensive tutorial walking through creating an Azure ML workspace, building an automated training pipeline, and deploying a RandomForest classifier as a production REST API.
Public preview: Uncovering hidden threats with the Dynamic Threat Detection Agent – Microsoft Defender's new GenAI-powered agent runs continuously in the backend to uncover hidden threats across Defender and Sentinel environments, delivering alerts with natural language explanations and MITRE mappings.