Azure Weekly

Issue #550 - 8th February 2026

Highlights this week include: Agent Skills for Azure Bicep with GitHub Copilot: From Manual Work to Automated Workflows: learn how to create reusable Agent Skills in GitHub Copilot that package domain expertise into automated workflows for Azure Bicep, including four ready-to-use skills for formatting, type conversion, and Azure Verified Modules migration. Writing Effective Prompts for Testing Scenarios: AI Assisted Quality Engineering: a deep dive into prompt design patterns for AI-assisted testing, covering role-based, few-shot, and context-rich prompting techniques that move QA teams beyond shallow test generation toward reliable, high-coverage outputs. Getting more out of Copilot with Copilot Pages: an overview and live demo of Copilot Pages, which turn Copilot Chat outputs into collaborative, editable canvases that support rich content, real-time co-editing, and seamless sharing across M365 apps.

Building Smarter Agents with FoundryIQ: Microsoft's Agentic RAG Platform: introduces FoundryIQ, a fully managed knowledge layer that enables agentic RAG by autonomously decomposing complex queries, planning multi-source searches, and synthesising answers across SharePoint, Blob Storage, OneLake, and the web. Observability in Generative AI: Building Trust with Systematic Evaluation in Microsoft Foundry: explains how Microsoft Foundry supports GenAIOps observability through evaluators for quality, safety, RAG grounding, and agent behaviour across the full lifecycle from model selection through production monitoring.

Serverless workspaces in Azure Databricks (GA): Azure Databricks serverless workspaces are now generally available, offering a fully managed SaaS experience with pre-configured serverless compute and default storage that eliminates the need for manual networking, cluster, and storage setup. Bringing together Fabric Real-time Intelligence, Notebook and Spark Structured Streaming Preview: a new preview integration lets developers access Eventstreams directly inside Spark Notebooks with auto-generated PySpark code and secure, secret-free connectivity, enabling low-latency real-time analytics and AI pipelines within Microsoft Fabric.

Reference Architecture for Highly Available Multi-Region Azure Kubernetes Service AKS: a practical reference architecture for running AKS across multiple Azure regions using Azure Front Door, geo-replicated data services, and regional ingress layers, with detailed trade-off analysis of active/active, active/passive, and cold standby deployment patterns.

Finally, upcoming community events: Join us at SQLCon 2026 (March 16–20) co-locates with FabCon in Atlanta featuring 50+ SQL sessions and shared keynotes, and SQLBits 2026 returns to ICC Wales (April 22–25) covering SQL Server 2025, Microsoft Fabric, AI-powered analytics, and more. Book your tickets now.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago.