Browse Azure News (168)

Justin Bettencourt rounds up the May 2026 Azure SDK releases, including GA for the Azure SDK for Rust and the .NET Azure Batch client library, plus new Azure AI Search knowledge-base retrieval features and preview Azure AI Agent Server hosting libraries across .NET, Python, and JavaScript.

Santhosh_Ravin1 introduces Efficient Scaledown (Preview) for Microsoft Fabric Spark, explaining how remote shuffle storage and shuffle migration reduce recomputation during scale-down, improve resiliency, and cut compute costs, with concrete benchmark results and the Spark configuration needed to enable the feature.

Wes Steyn shows how to build an “agent harness” (a loop around a model with tools, planning, memory, and web search) using Microsoft Agent Framework. The post walks through creating a chat client with Microsoft AI Foundry, wrapping it into a harness agent, and running it in a console UI with plan/execute modes.

Wes Steyn introduces a hands-on series for building a CLI-style “claw” (a coding agent) using Microsoft Agent Framework, explaining the core harness loop—tools, planning, memory, approvals, and observability—and outlining how the sample evolves from a minimal agent to a production-ready service in .NET and Python.

Eric van Wijk announces the deprecation and planned retirement of the Azure DevOps OIDC issuer used by Workload Identity Federation (WIF) service connections, and explains what Azure Pipelines users need to do to move existing connections to the Microsoft Entra issuer before the 2027 deadline.

Govind Kamtamneni explains how to build an outcome-driven “learning system” in Microsoft Foundry using OpenEnv environments, rubric-based evals, and a closed-loop optimizer. The post contrasts non-parametric harness tuning with parametric post-training (ECHO), and shows how Azure Container Apps sandboxes provide an isolated, enterprise-ready runtime for agent rollouts.

Taesoo Kim explains how Microsoft’s MDASH agentic scanning system moved from a benchmark win into real engineering workflows, feeding validated findings into Microsoft Defender, GitHub Advanced Security, and Azure DevOps. The post breaks down recent CVEs found across Windows and identity components, plus what pipeline changes improved results and what still fails.

jiang_jenny1 introduces the Fabric Spark Operations Skill (preview), an AI-assisted, read-only troubleshooting tool for Spark workloads in Microsoft Fabric. It turns common investigations—failed notebooks, pipeline failures, session triage, and performance issues—into natural-language commands that produce a severity-ranked diagnostic report with fix recommendations and links back to Fabric.

Satya Nadella highlights an Azure milestone: a new performance record for a leading LLM training benchmark at extreme scale, achieved through full-stack work across silicon, systems, networking, and software in partnership with NVIDIA.

Maria Bledsoe outlines a practical approach to Azure Storage migrations, from assessment and planning through tool selection and execution. The article explains when to use Azure Migrate, the Azure Copilot Migration Agent (preview), Azure Storage Mover for online sync, and Azure Data Box for offline bulk transfers.

Chris Welsch reports on İmeceMobil, an agriculture platform built on Microsoft Azure that helps Turkish farmers use AI-driven satellite imagery analysis, hyperlocal weather alerts, and expert guidance to improve crop decisions. The piece also highlights the Azure services and security tooling used to run the app at scale.

diptiborkar announces new Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks interoperability that lets teams use Microsoft OneLake as a shared, native storage layer, including GA read access and beta support for writing Unity Catalog managed tables. The post also frames OneLake as a governed data and context foundation for analytics and AI agent workloads.

preshah announces new interoperability features between Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric: storing Unity Catalog managed tables directly in OneLake (beta) and a “Publish to Fabric” workflow (preview) that creates mirrored catalog items from Databricks so the same tables can be queried across Fabric workloads without copying data.

Natalie Guevara summarizes GitHub’s May 2026 availability incidents and the reliability work underway, including moving parts of the monolith to Azure, isolating database domains, and hardening GitHub Actions and Copilot services against cascading failures.

Laura Jiang announces Copilot Autofix in limited private preview for GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps, which generates suggested fixes for supported CodeQL alerts and turns them into pull requests. The post explains what’s covered in preview, how the workflow fits into existing review gates, and how usage is billed via Azure.

SindhuBharadwaj introduces a Fabric-first migration flow that lets you mount an Azure Data Factory instance inside a Fabric workspace and migrate selected pipelines without switching portals. The post outlines the migration steps, supported connection/authentication mappings, and the validation work to do before re-enabling triggers in production.

Jeffrey Fritz announces the .NET Day on Agentic Modernization livestream (June 16, 2026), focused on practical ways to modernize existing .NET applications without a full rewrite. The agenda highlights GitHub Copilot-assisted modernization, Aspire-based approaches, migration of WinForms and line-of-business apps, and adding agentic/AI capabilities.

The Microsoft Foundry Team announces Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic) is now available in Microsoft Foundry, and explains how it’s used to power autonomous agents in Foundry Agent Service and GitHub Copilot, with an emphasis on enterprise guardrails, governance controls, and token-based pricing.

Dan Hellem and Andrew Brenner announce a limited public preview that brings GitHub Copilot code reviews into Azure Repos pull requests, and walk through how to enable it at the organization, repository, and user levels. The post also documents preview guardrails and how token usage is billed via GitHub AI credits to Azure Cost Management.

Jon Galloway recaps Microsoft Build 2026 with the main developer announcements across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Azure, Windows, Visual Studio, and .NET—highlighting agentic workflows, new tooling, governance specs, and a curated set of sessions and hubs to follow up on what shipped.

Daniel Roth rounds up the key .NET sessions from Microsoft Build 2026, highlighting what’s new in .NET 11 and C# (including union types), plus sessions on agentic web apps, AI building blocks for .NET, .NET MAUI on-device AI, and tooling like dotnetup.

davidwright, Arnaud Lheureux, and Suzanne Daniels explain why architecture and governance frameworks only help when they actively change delivery decisions. Using Git-Ape as the example, they show how to turn Azure Well-Architected, Azure Policy (including NIST mappings), and CAF guidance into repeatable repo-driven assessments with prioritized findings tied to code and policy.

Dom Robinson, samkemp, and Inbal Sagiv announce Foundry Local 1.2.0 and preview Foundry Local on Azure Local, focusing on running AI on-device and at the edge with better transcription, broader hardware support, improved cancellation, and simpler acceleration across Windows and Linux.

Sebastian Kohlmeier outlines what’s new in Microsoft Foundry observability at Build 2026, focusing on production-grade tracing, evaluations, and optimization for AI agents across multiple frameworks. The post also introduces ROI tracking for agents, tying operational signals to business value via the Foundry portal and APIs.

Swetha Machanavajhala announces new Azure Translator Document Translation capabilities from Microsoft Build, including GA support for translating standalone images (sync and batch), improved batch PDF translation using Azure AI Document Intelligence, and new structured format support (DITA XML and XLIFF 2.0), plus upcoming LLM-powered translation options.

arindamc explains how the Mirrored Database Change Feed connector (Preview) streams Delta Change Data Feed updates from Microsoft Fabric Mirroring into Fabric Eventstreams, enabling low-latency, event-driven processing and routing to destinations like Eventhouse, Activator, and Lakehouse without custom Spark polling jobs.

Shawn Henry rounds up the BUILD 2026 announcements for Microsoft Agent Framework, covering the new Agent Harness for production-grade agent execution, Foundry Hosted Agents for deploying and operating agents at scale, and CodeAct (Hyperlight) to reduce tool-calling latency and token usage, with examples in .NET and Python.

Manoj Bableshwar introduces Foundry Managed Compute, a new Microsoft Foundry capability for deploying open-source and custom AI models on elastic GPU capacity with Foundry-managed runtimes, unified endpoints/SDKs, built-in routing for cache efficiency, and Azure-native governance, networking, and observability.

Luis Quintanilla introduces Agent Optimizer for Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, a closed-loop workflow that evaluates hosted agents against pass/fail criteria, generates improved configurations (prompts, skills, model choices, and tool descriptions), and helps teams promote the best candidate to production using azd.

Lewis Liu introduces new agent memory capabilities in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service aimed at making enterprise agents more reliable and easier to operate, including procedural memory, a portal-based memory management UI, TTL controls, multimodal memory, and explicit “remember/forget” commands, plus benchmarking via STATE-Bench.

Linda Li and Maria Naggaga announce new preview capabilities in Azure AI Foundry for scaling production agents: Toolboxes features like Tool Search, Skills, Work IQ/Fabric IQ, Browser Automation, and managed MCP servers, plus Routines in Foundry Agent Service for trigger-based agent runs with governance via Guardrails.

Amanda Foster announces new Microsoft Foundry capabilities for getting AI agents into production across an enterprise: publishing Foundry agents into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, a new “autopilot agent” model with its own identity, and incoming Agent-to-Agent (A2A) endpoints for cross-agent interoperability.

Microsoft Defender Security Research Team breaks down “Miasma,” a large-scale npm supply-chain compromise that abused a GitHub Actions OIDC publishing workflow to ship trojanized @redhat-cloud-services packages. It explains the multi-stage obfuscation, credential theft targets (including Azure tokens), worm-like propagation, and concrete hunting and mitigation steps.

Peyton Fraser, Joe Filcik, and Ronak Chokshi summarize the Build 2026 updates for Azure Content Understanding, including GPT-5.2 support, first-class integration in the Microsoft Foundry portal, broader native file-type ingestion, and new integrations for agentic and Markdown-centric workflows (Agent Framework, LangChain, and MarkItDown).

Tsuyoshi Ushio introduces azure-functions-skills (public preview), a plugin + CLI that wires AI coding agents (including GitHub Copilot CLI and VS Code) with MCP config, hooks, and playbooks to scaffold, validate, and deploy Azure Functions using current best practices like managed identity and Key Vault references.

Jay Parikh outlines Microsoft’s approach to an enterprise “agent platform” that treats AI as a production system: build agents in GitHub, ground them with Microsoft IQ, run them in Foundry, govern them with Agent 365 and the Microsoft Security stack, and continuously improve via evals, traces, tuning, and feedback loops.

Anna Hoffman summarizes Microsoft SQL announcements from Build 2026, focused on an “agentic” database developer workflow powered by GitHub Copilot across VS Code and SSMS, plus Azure SQL Hyperscale capabilities and new security and streaming features.

stclarke reports on a Mayo Clinic and Microsoft collaboration to build a purpose-built frontier AI model for healthcare, combining Mayo’s de-identified clinical data and longitudinal insights with Microsoft’s AI and cloud capabilities, with planned availability via Azure AI Foundry APIs.

Aseem Datar announces Microsoft Discovery general availability and a preview of the Microsoft Discovery desktop app, focusing on how the platform supports governed, reproducible agentic AI workflows for scientific and engineering R&D across evidence, tools, and iterative experimentation.

Naomi Moneypenny lays out a practical model lifecycle for Microsoft Foundry: how to pick models by workload fit, validate them with your own evals and datasets, control latency and cost, and operate safely in production with monitoring, governance, and rollback.