Azure Weekly

Issue #548 - 25th January 2026

A relatively quiet edition this week, but there are still some thoroughly interesting articles. Here are the highlights: Improving Efficiency through Adaptive CPU Uncore Power Management – Microsoft and Intel co-designed Efficiency Latency Control (ELC) for Intel Xeon 6 processors, achieving up to 11% power reduction under moderate loads while maintaining performance. Which Azure network design is cheaper? – A detailed cost comparison of Azure networking architectures (hub-and-spoke, Virtual WAN, indirect spokes, and AVNM) revealing that Virtual WAN is often the most cost-effective for large-scale deployments.

Simplifying Image Signing with Notary Project and Artifact Signing (GA) – Azure Artifact Signing reaches general availability, combining with the CNCF Notary Project to provide managed certificate signing for container images with short-lived certificates and verified Azure identities. Using on-behalf-of flow for Entra-based MCP servers – A guide to implementing OAuth on-behalf-of flow in Python FastMCP servers, enabling MCP tools to access Microsoft Graph API using the user's Entra identity.

Azure Playwright Testing Service (Preview): Run Playwright Tests on Cloud Browsers – A new preview service enabling developers to run Playwright tests on cloud-hosted browsers without managing infrastructure, supporting parallel execution and detailed trace analysis.

Simplifying data movement across multiple clouds with Copy job – Microsoft Fabric Copy job expands multi-cloud connectivity with new incremental copy connectors and CDC support for SAP Datasphere Outbound to Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage.

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