Azure Weekly

Issue #565 - 31st May 2026

A bit of a lull before the BUILD conference next week. Highlights this week include: Claude Opus 4.8 is now available in Microsoft Foundry: Anthropic's most capable Opus model is now available in Microsoft Foundry, built for complex coding, reliable multi-step agentic tasks, and document-heavy enterprise analysis that holds context across longer sessions. Automate evaluations Microsoft Foundry: A walkthrough of Foundry's evaluation tooling, covering end-to-end run tracing, on-demand synthetic test datasets, automated red-team attacks, AI-driven root-cause analysis of failures, and runtime guardrails such as Task Adherence that inspect every tool call. Azure Functions MCP extension now supports MCP Prompts: The Azure Functions MCP extension now supports MCP prompt triggers in public preview, completing coverage of all three core Model Context Protocol primitives (tools, resources, and prompts) for building MCP servers on Azure Functions.

In Analytics: Incremental Liquid Clustering in Microsoft Fabric: Faster, smarter, and truly incremental: Now in Fabric Runtime 2.0, Incremental Liquid Clustering re-clusters only the data that needs it, keeping clustering time roughly flat as tables grow rather than rising linearly, which makes OPTIMIZE costs far more predictable. From Excel to Delta Tables - Simplifying Excel Data Ingestion with Shortcut Transformations Preview: Fabric's Shortcut Transformations (Preview) now extend their zero-code ingestion experience to Excel, letting teams bring spreadsheet data into Delta tables the same way they already do with CSV, Parquet, and JSON.

In preview Public Preview: Azure Site Recovery Support for Performance Plus Managed Disks: Azure Site Recovery can now replicate virtual machines that use Performance Plus enabled managed disks (Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD), giving high-IOPS and high-throughput workloads Azure-to-Azure disaster recovery with consistent performance across primary and secondary regions during replication, test failover, and full failover. How to use Instance Mix with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets: Instance Mix lets a Flexible-orchestration Virtual Machine Scale Set define up to five compatible VM sizes under a single "Mix" SKU, so Azure can choose from that list at scale-out based on your allocation strategy to ease regional capacity, quota, and pricing constraints.

Finally, Entra Automation: Users, Groups, and Conditional Access: A tutorial on using Microsoft Graph PowerShell to automate Entra ID user creation, security groups, group membership, and Conditional Access policies, with report-only mode for validating changes safely before enforcement.