Azure Weekly

Issue #562 - 10th May 2026

Start of a new month means lots of product announcements! Highlights this week include: Fabric April 2026 Feature Summary: roundup of Microsoft Fabric updates including tabbed multitasking GA, AI Auto-Description for semantic models, deeper VS Code integration, notebook retry policies, cross-workspace MLflow logging and Eventhouse remote MCP. Manage failure notifications from the monitoring hub in Fabric (Preview): A new Schedule failures page in the Fabric monitoring hub gives a single place to view, configure and edit failure notifications across all scheduled items, replacing the old per-item approach.
OneLake security (Generally Available): Fine-grained role-based access control for OneLake at the item, folder, table and row or column level reaches GA, with a new role-creation wizard, inline RLS validation and default enablement on supported items. OneLake catalog is now natively available in Foundry (Generally Available): OneLake catalog is built directly into Microsoft Foundry so AI builders can browse governed enterprise data and turn it into knowledge sources for agents without leaving the Foundry workflow. Discover items across workspaces with the OneLake Catalog Search API, MCP and CLI tools (Preview): Cross-workspace discovery of Fabric items is now available programmatically through a REST API, a built-in MCP tool for AI agents and a new fab find Fabric CLI command.

General Availability of Azure Dl/D/Esv7-series VMs based on Intel Xeon 6 processors. The Azure Resource Manager MCP Server: A new public-preview remote MCP server gives AI agents first-class access to Azure infrastructure operations, including generating and executing Azure Resource Graph queries and deploying and managing ARM template deployments.

Foundry Toolkit goes GA: Building agents with code: Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast episode walking through Microsoft's Foundry Toolkit (formerly the AI Toolkit) for VS Code, which brings model selection, prompt iteration, agent building, evaluation and production tracing into a single extension. AI Subagents 'Coming Soon' to Visual Studio Copilot: Microsoft's Mads Kristensen has confirmed that Copilot subagents, already documented in VS Code for context isolation, custom agents, parallel execution and search, are coming soon to Visual Studio. AI-assisted AWS to Azure migration with GitHub Copilot agents: A framework of eight purpose-built custom GitHub Copilot agents backed by MCP servers automates the full AWS-to-Azure migration lifecycle, from discovery through architecture design, IaC conversion, code refactoring, CI/CD generation and a 15-point validation report. Copilot Cowork Hands-On Experiences: Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast episode 427 covers hands-on experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork, including custom skills, artifact management, IRM-protected document friction and data-security considerations for early adopters.

Finally, a post we've been working on for the last few months, based on our experience of delivering AI projects: AI Strategy: Think Top-Down, Experiment Bottom-Up: which argues that durable AI progress requires running top-down strategic planning (objective, strategy, tactics) and bottom-up experimentation simultaneously, with a feedback loop between them and a small protected "incubator" team that sits alongside the everyday performance engine. An audio version of this post is also available.