Azure Weekly

Issue #553 - 1st March 2026

Quite a packed edition this week. Highlights include: Build Sensitivity Label‑Aware, Secure RAG with Azure AI Search and Purview - Azure AI Search now integrates with Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels so that RAG and Copilot-style applications can index protected documents and enforce label-based access controls at query time. Integrating Microsoft Foundry with OpenClaw: Step by Step Model Configuration - A walkthrough of deploying models from Microsoft Foundry's catalog and configuring them as the reasoning backend for OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework that executes tasks and controls browsers locally.

Rethinking Background Workloads with Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps - A comparison of Azure Functions on Container Apps (ideal for event-driven, orchestrated workflows with built-in triggers and Durable Functions) versus Container App Jobs (better suited to containerised batch workloads requiring full runtime control). Host Declarative Markdown-Based Agents on Azure Functions - An experimental feature that lets you deploy AGENTS.md-based agent projects, complete with skills, MCP tools, and custom Python functions, to Azure Functions as scalable cloud APIs with a single azd up command. Ian Griffiths appeared On .NET Live to talk about Reactive Extensions for .NET - Rx.NET v7 and Futures and a published a blog post which shares the code from the demos.

Finally, An introduction to the Native Execution Engine for Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric's Native Execution Engine uses vectorized C++ execution powered by open-source Velox and Apache Gluten to accelerate Spark jobs with no code changes, delivering up to 4× faster queries at no additional compute cost. Zero-copy access to OneLake data in Azure Databricks (Preview) - OneLake catalog federation now lets Azure Databricks query data stored in Microsoft Fabric's OneLake directly through Unity Catalog, eliminating the need for data copies, extra pipelines, or redundant refresh schedules.

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.