Azure Weekly

Issue 576

23rd August 2026

Highlights this week include:

  • The August 17 outage, and the work ahead by Vlad Fedorov - GitHub's recent outages underscored the necessity for faster reliability enhancements such as scaling infrastructure, optimizing Azure use, and improving operations to manage increased commits, pull requests, and Actions runs.
  • Announcing General Availability of Managed Instance on Azure App Service by Gaurav Seth - Managed Instance on Azure App Service now provides a 99.95% production SLA, expanded regional availability in eight locations, and enhanced integration with Premium v4 features, simplifying enterprise migration of legacy .NET Framework applications with minimal code modifications.
  • AKS Hyperscale Control Plane Now in Preview by Richard Hooper - Azure Kubernetes Service now offers a hyperscale control plane preview enabling users to specify tiered capacity guarantees during cluster creation for enhanced performance and reliability.
  • Azure Quick Review (azqr) v4.0.0: What You Need to Know by Carlos Mendible - Azure Quick Review v4.0.0 adds VM sizing, Service Health analysis, SQL Server lifecycle management, and region selection capabilities with breaking changes requiring script reviews for upgrade.

And four AI related posts from my colleagues:

  • How to trust your AI-assisted data analysis by James Broome - Trust in AI-assisted data analysis hinges on maintaining a clear audit trail of how results are derived, emphasizing the need for reproducible code over polished but unverifiable outputs.
  • How to Implement Retrieval in RAG a 3-part series by Carmel Eve - Implementing effective retrieval in RAG is crucial because it ensures only relevant information is used, improving LLM response quality while enabling document citation and continuous knowledge updates. How to Implement Augmentation in RAG: Augmentation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation structures prompts with system instructions, retrieved context, and the user's question to guide LLMs toward accurate, context-aware responses while managing token limits and document formatting. How to Implement Generation in RAG: Generation in RAG depends critically on effective retrieval and augmentation for producing high-quality model responses.

🤖 AI

  • How to Implement Retrieval in RAG Implementing effective retrieval in RAG is crucial because it ensures only relevant information is used, improving LLM response quality while enabling document citation and continuous knowledge updates.
  • How to Implement Augmentation in RAG Augmentation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation structures prompts with system instructions, retrieved context, and the user's question to guide LLMs toward accurate, context-aware responses while managing token limits and document formatting.
  • How to Implement Generation in RAG Generation in RAG depends critically on effective retrieval and augmentation for producing high-quality model responses.
  • Add a Microsoft Foundry model to the GitHub Copilot app The GitHub Copilot app now supports integration of personal or Foundry-deployed models for BYOK setups with low latency through Azure OpenAI’s v1 Responses API.
  • Expanding Open Model Choice in Microsoft Foundry with New DeepSeek and NVIDIA Nemotron Models Microsoft Foundry expands its open model selection with DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning for improved agentic AI performance and tool use across multilingual workflows via Azure Direct, Fireworks on Foundry, and Hugging Face.
  • Choosing the Right Agent in Microsoft Foundry Choosing between Prompt and Hosted Agents in Microsoft Foundry depends on whether you prefer managed orchestration logic for declarative agents or implementing it within your code for more control with hosted agents.
  • Evidence to Decision: building an AI-envisioning workshop tool on Azure Evidence to Decision is an Azure-based AI tool that captures meeting evidence, drafts recommendations via AI, and retains decision authority with human reviewers.
  • Build a SAFE Agent on Microsoft Foundry The SAFE framework helps help desk agents address sign-in issues through appropriate scope, evidence, procedure, and escalation using ACS in Microsoft Foundry.
  • Browser automation with Pydantic-AI + Playwright Pydantic-AI with Playwright enables secure, programmable web browsing for agents, including page opening, navigation, and content extraction via Azure identity authentication and customizable token limits.
  • Local transcript cleanup in .NET with s1-mini ElBruno.S1Mini is a .NET library that integrates the s1-mini model to normalize raw ASR transcripts into clean, human-readable text without requiring any network access.
  • Model router updates: new regions, a refreshed model pool, and understanding the hill climb Model router now supports Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6, removes deprecated models, and expands to 28 global and 21 data zone regions with automatic updates.
  • How to trust your AI-assisted data analysis Trust in AI-assisted data analysis hinges on maintaining a clear audit trail of how results are derived, emphasizing the need for reproducible code over polished but unverifiable outputs.
  • Build AI agents without leaving VS Code, join our 3-part Reactor Series The free three-part Reactor Series teaches developers to build, debug, and deploy AI agents in VS Code using the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit, with hands-on sessions on executive briefing agents and multi-agent career copilots.

🔎 Analytics

🖥️ Compute

  • Generally Available: vCore Customization: Disable Multithreading and Configurable Constrained Cores Azure now offers GA vCore customization to let users disable multithreading and configure constrained cores, giving finer control over VM performance for demanding workloads.
  • Public Preview: Azure Linux on WSL Azure Linux on WSL’s public preview lets developers validate app behavior with production configs, reproduce bugs more reliably, and cut debugging time by simulating real environments locally.
  • Retirement: Azure VMware Solution License-included service will be retired August 30, 2027 Azure VMware Solution will stop offering its previously license-included service on August 30, 2027 due to Broadcom's policy change requiring customers to bring their own portable VMware licenses.
  • What Is Windows Server vNext? Windows Server vNext features identity modernization with post-quantum cryptography, default transport hardening via mandatory SMB signing, secure SMB over QUIC, and encrypted RPC interfaces, setting a forward-looking foundation for enterprise infrastructure.
  • Building Event-Driven Agents with Azure Functions Azure Functions' serverless agents runtime lets developers define event-driven AI agents in Markdown, automatically registering triggers and running them with the Microsoft Agent Framework, simplifying integration for tasks like scheduled news digests without needing separate timer functions.
  • The OpenVMM Project OpenVMM, an MIT-licensed Rust VMM project with nearly 100 contributors, has expanded through partnerships like Intel and Arm, incorporating cross-platform support, advanced device emulation, improved CI infrastructure, and confidential computing for Azure VMs.
  • Announcing General Availability of Disable Multithreading and Configurable Constrained Cores Azure launches GA features for disabling Simultaneous Multithreading/Hyper-Threading and configuring constrained cores to enhance performance and cut licensing costs for various workloads.

🚢 Containers

🗄️ Databases

🛠️ Developer tools

🔩 DevOps

🧬 Hybrid + multicloud

  • Episode 1: Onboarding Azure Arc at Scale | The Azure Arc Check-In This episode explains scalable onboarding strategies using non-interactive authentication, Ansible for Linux, and Group Policy for Windows to connect thousands of servers to Azure Arc.
  • What’s new for small form factor infrastructure Version 2607 of Azure's small form factor infrastructure now supports multiple network interfaces and additional disks, enhancing networking flexibility for edge devices and introducing Just-In-Time device access to boost security.

🎭 Identity

🔌 Integration

🎓 Learning and Certifications

⚖️ Management and Governance

  • Azure Service Groups: The Missing Layer Between Governance and Operations Azure Service Groups offer a flexible method to organize resources across subscriptions and regions while preserving existing governance structures, improving operations, resiliency planning, and cost management in large enterprises.
  • Generally Available: What-If for Azure Deployment Stacks Azure's new Stacks What-if feature offers a detailed preview of updates showing which resources will be deleted or detached to help teams confidently manage production deployment stacks with reduced noise and persistent resource IDs.
  • Power Azure SRE Agent with the tools it needs The Azure Connector Namespace now manages remote MCP servers, streamlining integration with tools such as GitHub, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Azure SQL, GitLab, Jira, and PagerDuty to improve incident investigation and remediation.
  • Azure Copilot Introduces Direct Access to Agents Azure Copilot enables direct access to specialized agents for troubleshooting, deployment planning, optimization, and resiliency, enhancing expert engagement and accelerating problem resolution.
  • Who Ordered All These Tokens? Giving AI Spend a Name in FOCUS FOCUS introduces a customizable pattern for classifying AI spend by mapping Azure price sheet meters to token types, enabling accurate cost allocation despite scattered billing data.
  • Stop restricting the agent. Start restricting its environment. Azure SRE Agent improves LLM tooling by restricting environments instead of limiting the agent, enabling safer autonomous operations via external layers that define accessible resources and task-specific authority.

🚌 Migration

🌐 Networking

🔐 Security

📦 Storage

  • Your Azure Backups Don’t Have to Be Complicated! Azure Backup now integrates seamlessly with Azure Resiliency, offering unified protection for both cloud and hybrid workloads while simplifying agent management through built-in extensions.

🔗 Web

  • Generally Available: Managed Instance on Azure App Service Managed Instance on Azure App Service simplifies migration by allowing web apps to transition with virtually no configuration or coding adjustments, supporting both on-premises and VM deployments.
  • Use Aspire to implement and deploy the BFF security architecture Aspire orchestrates the AppHost configuration to manage Auth0 identity providers, Angular frontends, and downstream APIs within a unified BFF security architecture.
  • Announcing General Availability of Managed Instance on Azure App Service Managed Instance on Azure App Service now provides a 99.95% production SLA, expanded regional availability in eight locations, and enhanced integration with Premium v4 features, simplifying enterprise migration of legacy .NET Framework applications with minimal code modifications.
  • Azure Static Web Apps Login Redirects: How to Stop It Azure Static Web Apps may enter an infinite login redirect loop due to misconfigurations like passing OAuth parameters or using internal rewrite rules, requiring the app to run on Standard SKU with correct redirect URIs, enabled ID tokens in Entra ID, and avoiding custom `loginParameters` while setting explicit redirects.

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