Browse Azure News (204)

Blanca Li summarizes April 2026 updates to Microsoft Foundry Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT): global training for o4-mini across 13+ Azure regions, new GPT-4.1 family model graders, and practical best practices plus pitfalls to help teams design reliable graders and scale fine-tuning safely.

Aviram Shemesh and Jennifer Rutzer explain how to build a cryptographic inventory and run an ongoing cryptographic posture management lifecycle, using Microsoft Security tooling (like Defender and GitHub Advanced Security), Azure services (like Key Vault and Network Watcher), and partner CPM solutions to improve quantum-safe readiness.

Jim Harrer shares a curated list of 20 VS Live! Las Vegas 2026 sessions now available on the Visual Studio YouTube channel, spanning AI/Copilot topics, modern .NET and C#, Azure cloud-native development, GitHub Actions, and practical productivity and architecture guidance.

Microsoft Fabric Blog introduces the generally available OneLake MCP tools, showing how an AI agent can discover Fabric items, inspect schemas, map OneLake storage, and assess mirrored-database health through a single natural-language conversation (no code or portal clicks).

Microsoft Fabric Blog explains what customers are asking about Fabric Data Factory vs Azure Data Factory (ADF): when to migrate, how mature it is, and what new capabilities you gain—like Mirroring to OneLake, Copy Jobs with CDC, Dataflows Gen2, Copilot assistance, and managed Airflow/dbt execution.

Yun Jung Choi explains that Azure MCP tools are now built into Visual Studio 2022 via the Azure development workload, letting developers enable an Azure MCP Server inside GitHub Copilot Chat to provision resources, deploy apps, and troubleshoot Azure services without installing a separate extension.

Fernando Vasconcellos outlines evergreen cloud cost optimization principles and explains how AI workloads change cost patterns, with practical guidance on visibility, governance, rightsizing, and continuous review—framed around managing and optimizing spend on Azure over time.

Laura Jiang announces two Azure DevOps Advanced Security updates: CodeQL default setup to enable org-wide code scanning without per-repo pipeline configuration, and a combined alerts experience (with security campaigns) to triage and coordinate remediation across all repositories.

Reenu Saluja breaks down the main Azure hosting options for production AI agents and explains when to use each, with a deeper walkthrough of Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agents (deployment, lifecycle management, observability, scaling, and invocation patterns).

Kristen Womack explains how `azd update` simplifies keeping the Azure Developer CLI current across Windows, macOS, and Linux, including how to switch between stable and daily release channels.

Ismael Mejía Useche and Pooja Yarabothu introduce the “PostgreSQL Like a Pro” video series, focused on practical ways to run and modernize PostgreSQL workloads on Azure—covering AI agent patterns, AI-assisted migrations in VS Code, and performance/resiliency considerations at scale.

Sergey Menshykh explains how Agent Skills in .NET can be authored as file-based skills, inline C# skills, or class-based skills (for example shipped via NuGet), then composed into a single provider. The article also shows script execution and a human-approval gate for tool/script calls in production-style agent scenarios.

Sandeep Sen announces Azure MCP Server 2.0’s stable release, focusing on self-hosted remote MCP servers, authentication options (managed identity and OBO), security hardening, and operational improvements to support agentic workflows that automate and manage Azure resources.

Arnaud Lheureux, davidwright, and sdaniels walk through a hands-on “agentic platform engineering” demo using Git-ape inside VS Code, where GitHub Copilot agents (via Azure MCP) can deploy and manage Azure infrastructure through validated, policy-aware actions.

Nick Brady’s March 2026 digest for Microsoft Foundry (Azure AI Foundry) covers major GA releases like Foundry Agent Service, GPT-5.4 family models, evaluations with continuous monitoring into Azure Monitor, private networking, and SDK 2.0 updates across Python, JS/TS, Java, and .NET—plus guardrails and third-party runtime security integrations.

samkemp announces the GA of Foundry Local, a cross-platform on-device AI runtime and SDK that bundles ONNX Runtime and lets developers ship chat and audio inference inside apps with offline operation, hardware acceleration, and OpenAI-format APIs.

Alistair Speirs summarizes why Microsoft was named a Leader in Forrester’s Sovereign Cloud Platforms Wave (Q2 2026), and outlines how Microsoft Sovereign Cloud aims to deliver consistent controls across public, private, and partner-operated environments using tools like Azure Arc and Azure Local.

Lily Ma explains how to connect an MCP server hosted on Azure Functions to Microsoft Foundry agents, focusing on setup steps and the trade-offs between key-based auth, Microsoft Entra ID (managed identity), OAuth identity passthrough, and unauthenticated access.

Lilian Kasem (she/her) introduces a new Fluent API for building MCP Apps with Azure Functions (.NET isolated worker), showing how to turn an MCP tool into a UI-capable app and configure views, permissions, and CSP security policies with a small amount of code.

Jeffrey Fritz walks through GitHub Copilot’s application modernization assessment report, showing how it drives planning and execution for migrating .NET or Java apps to Azure, including issue triage (cloud readiness, upgrades, security), target compute comparisons (App Service/AKS/Container Apps), and downstream IaC and deployment outputs.