Azure Weekly

Issue #558 - 12th April 2026

Welcome to Issue 558 of The Azure Weekly Newsletter. Highlights this week include: MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2 in Microsoft Foundry: Microsoft announces public preview of three new in-house multimedia models on Foundry: MAI-Transcribe-1 for speech recognition across 25 languages at roughly half the GPU cost of leading alternatives, MAI-Voice-1 for high-fidelity speech generation that produces a minute of audio in under a second, and MAI-Image-2, a text-to-image model that debuted in the top three on the Arena.ai leaderboard.

Getting Started with Foundry Local: A Student Guide to the Microsoft Foundry Local Lab: a walkthrough of the Microsoft Foundry Local Lab aimed at students and self-taught developers, covering a thirteen-part hands-on path from installing the local runtime through SDK use, RAG, single and multi-agent workflows, evaluation-led development, Whisper transcription, custom ONNX models, tool calling, and a browser-based capstone UI.

How Do We Know AI Isn't Lying? The Art of Evaluating LLMs in RAG Systems: a practical guide to evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems, explaining why probabilistic LLM output is hard to grade, breaking down the key metrics (relevance, faithfulness, groundedness, completeness, hallucination rate), and introducing tools such as RAGAS, LangChain evaluators, and the emerging LLM-as-a-Judge pattern.

Visual Studio March Update – Build Your Own Custom Agents: The March update for Visual Studio 2026 Insiders introduces customisable GitHub Copilot agents defined as .agent.md files in your repo, reusable agent skills, a new language-aware find_symbol tool, enterprise MCP allowlist governance, Copilot-powered test profiling and live perf tips during debugging, and one-click NuGet vulnerability fixes.

Continued Investment in Azure App Service: a recap of ongoing Azure App Service investment, highlighting Premium v4 for higher performance, the new App Service Managed Instance for workloads needing deeper environment control, regular runtime updates across .NET, Node.js, Python, Java and PHP, expanded availability zone support, and improved GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps deployment workflows, including the recent GA of Aspire on App Service.

The Durable Task Scheduler Consumption SKU is now Generally Available: The pay-as-you-go Consumption SKU of Azure's Durable Task Scheduler is now generally available, offering a fully managed orchestration backend for AI agent workflows, event-driven pipelines, and distributed transactions with up to 500 actions per second, 30 days of history, Entra ID authentication, and no idle costs.

Azure Container Apps Blue-Green Terraform Deployment: a walkthrough of implementing zero-downtime blue-green deployments on Azure Container Apps entirely through Terraform, using revision labels, weighted traffic, and an enable_blue_green flag to manage the two-apply lifecycle, with instant rollback by flipping traffic back to the still-warm previous revision.

Enterprise-Scale Azure Subscription Vending Using Azure Verified Modules (AVM): a production-ready guide to automating Azure subscription creation at scale using the Azure Verified Modules subscription vending pattern with Terraform, covering management group placement, the often-tricky Subscription Creator role assignment at the EA enrollment-account scope, and alignment with Azure Landing Zone best practices.

General Availability of Private Application Gateway on Azure Application Gateway v2: application Gateway v2 now supports fully private deployments at general availability, removing the long-standing public IP requirement and enabling private IP-only frontends, full NSG and route table control, deny-all outbound rules, and forced tunneling through hub firewalls or on-premises appliances for regulated and landing-zone workloads.