u/JohnSavill

Study cram is up for the AI-103, Develop AI Apps and Agents on Azure. Just under 2 hours long with whiteboard and a lot of code examples. Hope it helps and good luck!

📽️ https://youtu.be/WK2BvjOYTCQ

00:00 - Introduction

00:24 - Microsoft learning resources

01:17 - What are core AI terms

02:59 - Responsible AI

06:55 - Foundry resource and project

14:35 - Models

25:15 - Model deployment options

29:44 - Using playgrounds to experiment

33:46 - Model routing

38:19 - Evaluations

41:22 - Using APIs and SDKs

44:11 - Responses API

45:14 - ChatCompletions

45:46 - Comparing

50:37 - OpenAI vs Foundry SDK

53:23 - Tools

54:27 - OpenAI responses tools

57:25 - Foundry services

58:13 - Foundry tools

1:02:56 - Skills

1:03:57 - Toolbox

1:05:50 - Knowledge

1:10:52 - Optimizing the solution

1:15:11 - Guardrails

1:17:45 - Bringing it together

1:19:56 - Microsoft Agent Framework

1:21:00 - Agents

1:27:56 - Workflows

1:29:04 - Agent harness

1:30:13 - Foundry Agent Service

1:30:42 - Prompt agent

1:34:20 - Hosted agent

1:34:55 - Publishing agents

1:35:46 - Foundry services

1:36:13 - Language

1:40:28 - Speech

1:44:10 - Translation

1:46:11 - Vision

1:46:23 - Using generative AI

1:49:50 - Generating images

1:51:44 - Generating videos

1:52:47 - Viewing metrics

1:53:34 - Azure Content Understanding

1:56:09 - Summary

1:56:41 - Close

This month's Microsoft AI Update (July 2026) is up.

https://youtu.be/2GpTcz6JVhQ

00:00 - Introduction

00:09 - New videos

01:18 - Model thinking

02:09 - Open AI GPT-5.6

03:04 - GPT-transcribe and GPT-live-transcribe

03:52 - MAI-Image-2.5 Pro and MAI-Voice-2 Flash

04:30 - Claude Opus 5 available

05:10 - Kimi K3 via Fireworks AI

05:35 - Grok 4.5 and Gemini 3.6 in GitHub Copilot

06:19 - ROI for agents

07:13 - APAC data zone

07:40 - New portal

08:03 - Sensitive trace content handling

08:44 - Foundry IQ support

09:48 - GitHub Copilot harness option

11:10 - @ mention app agents in chat

11:29 - Copilot in app updates

11:54 - Meeting recaps

12:09 - M365 copilot app notifications

12:23 - Event-driven tasks

12:51 - Cowork enhanced skill support

13:09 - Skill Recorder

14:00 - Copilot vision

14:12 - Browser tools for Copilot in VS Code

14:29 - APIM AI Gateway

15:18 - Close

New video exploring how we can bring (only) the most relevant and up-to-date knowledge from our enterprise and the Internet to our agentic applications with Microsoft IQ.

00:00 - Introduction

00:39 - Responsibilities and requirements

01:17 - Tasks and AI

02:07 - Intelligence needed

02:16 - How I work

03:28 - State of the business

04:16 - Institutional knowledge

04:43 - Internet

05:16 - AI and models

06:52 - Multiple models and flexibility

08:49 - Bringing intelligence and tools to AI

09:58 - Microsoft IQ

11:21 - Work IQ

13:16 - Fabric IQ

15:33 - Foundry IQ

16:59 - Web IQ

18:52 - Most relevant data

19:17 - Using all types of intelligence

20:24 - Identity and least privilege

21:53 - Security and protection

23:26 - Observe and improve

24:43 - Summary

25:27 - Close

https://youtu.be/LrIS9lcSbko

This week's hotel-based very quick Azure Update is up :-) Very big change coming to Entra strong-authentication!

https://youtu.be/bemRBrJnYvA

00:00 - Introduction

00:20 - AFD Edge Actions

01:50 - Azure Databricks SQL Serverless new region

02:28 - Azure Arc-enable SQL to Azure VM-based SQL

03:00 - SQL VS Code extension updates

03:33 - Advanced platform metrics

04:58 - Entra ID passkey changes

06:23 - Close

Really quick overview video on Azure Health Models. Understand, observe and alert based on your overall service health, business functions and application components and not just the base resources.

Azure Health Models help you:
- See your service the way your users do
- Combine signals across resources, apps, and business workflows
- Detect issues earlier and reduce false positives
- Build meaningful, actionable alerts

📽️ https://youtu.be/RKEvu6asHd4

00:00 - Introduction
00:06 - Resource health challenges
01:34 - Azure Health Models
06:41 - Demo
11:23 - Summary
11:46 - Close

This months Microsoft AI Update is up!

https://youtu.be/opCw_CDf9fg

00:00 - Introduction

00:29 - New videos

01:10 - Claude models running on Azure

01:57 - Anthropic Fable 5 in Foundry and Copilot

03:32 - Claude Sonnet 5

03:43 - Kimi K2.7 in GitHub Copilot

03:51 - MAI models

05:29 - Alon

05:55 - MDASH

06:44 - Frontier tuning

07:05 - Foundry IQ

08:03 - Work IQ

09:30 - Web IQ

10:51 - Foundry agents

11:48 - Foundry evaluations and tracing

13:29 - Foundry Toolbox and Memory

14:46 - Foundry agent security license changes

15:15 - Computer

15:44 - Redesigned workflow experience

16:07 - Updated orchestration layer

16:30 - Copilot Cowork

17:05 - Microsoft Scout

17:52 - GitHub Copilot desktop app

18:07 - Sandboxes

18:57 - GitHub Copilot SDK

19:07 - Close

This week's Azure Update is up!

📽️ https://youtu.be/RQmWSjKIQJY

📄 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azure-weekly-update-nearly-4th-july-2026-john-savill-5hk6c/

• VM instant application-consistent restore points (00:54) - This enables a restore point that is application consistent, i.e. utilizes the VSS capabilities in Windows or pre/post scripts on Linux to ensure all app data is flushed out to disk, can be restored as soon as its created, no delay for the normal background data replication.
• New client-side blob integrity (01:36) - CRC64-NVME is integrated into the latest SDKs enabling greater support for integrity assurance for client applications at a byte level.
• ASM migration from Google Cloud Storage (GCS) (02:11) - Azure Storage Mover now supports migration from Google Cloud Storage buckets via its S3-compatible interface to Azure blob storage. This does include support for private network support.
• PostgreSQL new PowerShell module (02:37) - The new PowerShell module for PostgreSQL Flexible which adds support for version 18 of PostgreSQL, elastic clusters and a number of other capabilities.
• Foundry Toolboxes (02:53) - Toolboxes provide a single endpoint for MCP clients to connect to that can then expose any combination of tools you define including exposing via a tool search to avoid flooding the model context with too many tools. The various IQs (Work, Foundry and Fabric) can also be exposed via toolbox. Foundry handles the authentication, lifecycle and governance.
• Foundry Claude on Azure (04:27) - Claude models are now available in Foundry hosted on Azure ensuring the entire AI app flow stays within the Microsoft governance and security boundary. Both global and US data zone options are available.
• Claude Sonnet 5 (05:01) - This includes the new Claude Sonnet 5 which has stronger coding and agentic performance and can easily replace Sonnet 4.6 and in many scenarios can be used in place of Opus 4.8 at a far better cost-performance. This is also available in GitHub Copilot and Azure Databricks
• Kimi K2.7 in GitHub Copilot (06:01) - The open-weight model Kimi K2.7 Code is also available in GitHub Copilot now as a new lower cost option.
• Quantum safe program acceleration (06:13) - The Microsoft Quantum Safe Program (QSP) is accelerating which includes TLS 1.3 adoption, changes to stored data cryptography and modernized cryptographic trust chains.
• Document PII NextGen Playground (07:14) - Azure AI Language has a playground enabling a way to evaluate capabilities. The Document PII has an updated playground with curated samples to see exactly how Personally Identifiable Information like addresses, names, financial IDs are detected and redacted.

With Copilot Cowork GA I wanted to walk through understanding non-Cowork vs Cowork capabilities, when to use, then for the usage-based billing how to plan, control and observe.

https://youtu.be/qXPTJDgbbPg

00:00 - Introduction

00:16 - M365 Copilot USL

03:39 - Copilot Cowork

07:53 - Usage based billing

09:21 - Planning

13:54 - Control

19:49 - Payment

20:30 - Observe and track

24:10 - Summary

25:44 - Close

New video exploring Web IQ, the newest edition to Microsoft IQ that complements the organizational context provided by Work IQ, Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ to provide Internet-sourced context.

Key differentiators from other Internet knowledge services are:

- Lowest latency (2.5x less latency than closest competitor)

- Highest quality grounding

- Token efficiency to only send the passages of source that are most applicable to save tokens on the model where desired

Check out the detail in the video.

📽️ https://youtu.be/YpUSm0_7Lgs

Really quick video looking at and showing the huge changes for identity integration for Azure Files.

https://youtu.be/sXNyXRgQTPs

Now supports:

- Managed identities

- Cloud-only user accounts

- macOS PSSO

New video looking at Azure's HorizonDB. A 100% PostgreSQL compatible, cloud-native database offering with great scale, performance and availability.

https://youtu.be/ZsLnWnjkJQw

00:00 - Introduction

00:08 - PostgreSQL

04:06 - Cloud-native architecture

04:50 - Azure HorizonDB

06:33 - Architecture

16:15 - Standby replicas

19:42 - Other features

21:21 - Pricing

23:22 - Summary

24:12 - Close

This week's Azure Update is up!

Article - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7471221969103892480/

Video - https://youtu.be/0dOmMLqrlw0

• Azure Boost Guest RDMA – Preview (00:47) - Azure Boost offloads a number of network, storage and mgmt functions to dedicated hardware on each node reducing latency and improving performance. Now in private preview we have RDMA which is a capability that instead of data flowing down the network stack and drivers it bypasses it between nodes providing even lower latency and higher throughput.
• ASR Linux NVMe Azure VM support – Preview (01:47) - Now your gen 2 Azure VMs with NVMe like the v6 Da/Ea/Fa running RHEL 9, SLES 15 and Ubuntu 24 can be migrated VM to VM.
• Premium SSD v2 non-zonal VM support – GA (02:12) - The sub-millisecond v2 of premium ssd with separate capacity, IOPS and throughput that has dynamic IOPS and throughput can now be used on VMs without AZ support.
• NCv6 – GA (02:38) - The new GPU enabled VM series that is using NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU which have 96GB of GDDR7 memory per GPU. They are available in both general purpose and compute optimized SKUs.
• Azure Batch legacy VM SKU retirements (03:07) - D, Ds, Dv2, Dsv2 and Ls all retire May 1st 2028. Av2, F, Fs, Fsv2,G ,GS and Lsv2 all retire November 15th 2028. Move to newer SKUs before this retirement date as pools using them may become unusable.
• Azure VPN Client for Linux (preview) retired – 8/31/2026 (03:39) - The preview Azure VPN Client for Linux that is used for point-to-site (P2S) to Azure VPN Gateway will not reach GA and is being retired. Instead transition to other VPN clients on Linux such as OpenVPN client or strongSwan depending on tunnel type.
• Azure Migrate Azure Files – GA (04:20) - Azure Migrate now supports the discovery and assessment of both SMB and NFS file shares on Windows or Linux for migration to Azure Files. This includes the business case comparing on-premises vs cloud costs, which Azure Files SKU to use and if a move to Azure VM is better.
• Minimum billable object size for cool, cold and archive access tiers – NOT July 1 2026 (04:52) - Original there was going to be a minimum object billable size for the non hot access tiers but this has been pushed from the planned July 1 2026 with no firm date at this time.
• GPv1 and Legacy Blob new account blocked – June 1st 2026 (05:22) - As part of the already announced retirement plan you can no longer create new general purpose v1 or legacy blob storage accounts. These will be fully retired October 13th 2026 where GPv1 will be converted to GPv2.
• Azure Managed Redis Entra RBAC for data management – Preview (05:57) - The Azure managed Redis (the very high performance in-memory cache/data store) now supports data plane Entra-ID integrated RBAC which means your Entra identities can be used to grant access to read/write/administer your Redis data and no longer having to use shared keys.
• Azure PostgreSQL maintenance control – GA (06:41) - PostgreSQL flexible server now has better controls for managing maintenance events which includes viewing, rescheduling and applying. You can reschedule for up to 14 days.
• PostgreSQL Hub for Azure Developers – GA (07:01) - This brings together application development and AI resources for developers including sample apps, tutorials, learning paths and solution accelerators. It is available at https://azure-samples.github.io/postgres-hub/.
• SSMS GitHub Copilot Agent Mode – Preview (07:27) - SQL Server Management Studio GitHub Copilot integration now includes the agent mode. Previously the integration was great to help with T-SQL, help with basic questions and admin tasks. With the agent mode this expands to helping investigate performance issues, tune queries, troubleshoot errors and more complex tasks. It can also use skills AND can run as a different user from the person logged in, i.e. a different database user or SQL login that Copilot will use for query execution.
• Cosmos DB Synapse Link retirement – 3/31/2029 (08:17) - With the forward direction being Microsoft Fabric the Azure Synapse Link is being retired. Instead use the Cosmos DB mirroring to Fabric going forward for higher performance and feature sets.
• Azure SQL DB Entra logins – GA (08:35) - Using Entra server principals (logins) for Azure SQL DB is now GA. This means you can create logins from external provider and then grant server roles to those Entra principals which also means you can disable SQL authentication. This is already possible with Azure SQL MI.
• SQL MCP Server - GA (09:11) - This provides an agentic way to interact databases including SQL, PostgreSQL and Cosmos DB.
• Azure Monitor ingestion volume change dashboard – Preview (09:38) - The metrics usage insights now shows the volume change of ingestion to help you understand the changes over time, for example detecting spikes or drops in traffic.
• Foundry agent security license changes – Preview (10:01) - Today some Foundry agent security capabilities are licensed as part of Defender for Cloud. These are moving to the Microsoft Agent 365 license since the Defender agent protection will be powered by the Agent 365 observability logs and agent map. So think of this as capabilities like agent discovery, posture, threat detection, real-time protection and advanced hunting.
• Anthropic Fable 5 in Foundry and GitHub Copilot (10:42) Fable 5, a Mythos class model (and a new class above Opus) for non-security work, is built for long-running, multi-step workflows that unfold over time. It supports complex code development across systems, research synthesis across documents, and analysis across tables, charts, and diagrams.  It’s designed for the hardest knowledge work and coding problems. It plans its approach and checks progress against it while refining its work. Note it has a 30 day prompt and response retention currently per Anthropic for quality, safety and attack mitigation purposes, so you should consider that. The data is NOT used for training future models. It is well suited for work including financial analysis and reporting, contract review and due diligence and complex engineering workflows. It also has improved vision so great for multimodal scenarios. It does have restrictions on its use in certain areas, for example cybersecurity. Then you add in Foundry's own safety and guardrail capabilities. Anthropic also released Mythos 5 under the same Project Glasswing restrictions that is for cybersecurity scenarios.

New video on the passkey registration campaign feature of Entra ID to help get more users leveraging the easy, fast, strong and phishing resistant authentication mechanism.

00:00 - Introduction

00:07 - Passkey benefits

03:24 - Nudging users

03:57 - Passkey policies

07:49 - Registration campaigns

14:38 - When are users nudged

16:41 - Summary

17:43 - Close

Video link https://youtu.be/10Se9jR-cR0

Azure Weekly Update BUILD SPECIAL is up! It's late not because of recording but because it was so long it took 3 hours to upload on Starlink 🤣

https://youtu.be/f1JZs2bYUss

0:00 - Introduction

01:33 - New videos

02:07 - Cobalt 200 ARM VMs – Preview

03:17 - Lasv5 and Laosv5 VM SKU - Preview

04:58 - Azure Linux 4 - Preview

05:50 - VMSS updates

05:20 - Azure Infrastructure Resiliency Manager – Preview

06:41 - Confidential TDX VM live migration - Preview

06:18 - ASR premium plus support – GA

07:35 - Azure Functions updates

09:08 - Logic App updates

12:28 - AKS updates

14:40 - Azure Container Apps updates

15:26 - API Management updates

19:47 - API Center updates – GA

19:10 - Azure Monitor updates

20:29 - Fabric Rayfin – Preview

22:04 - Azure HorizonDB – Preview

24:45 - Cosmos DB updates

32:51 - SQL Server in VM snapshot backup – Preview

32:26 - Azure Databricks branch – Preview

33:56 - Foundry IQ and Azure AI Search updates

36:36 - Azure AI Search new gen AI integration - GA

36:26 - Oracle to PostgreSQL schema conversion – GA

37:47 - PostgreSQL updates – Preview

38:13 - MySQL updates- GA

39:50 - MS SQL updates

40:49 - Azure DocumentDB updates – GA

41:19 - Azure Confidential Clean Room multiparty analytics - Preview

42:55 - Microsoft Execution Container (MXC)

43:40 - Agent governance with ASSERT and ACS

45:35 - Agent A2A - Preview

45:49 - Foundry guided guardrails – Preview

46:33 - Foundry tracing and evaluation updates

47:36 - Agent service voice live integration - GA

47:52 - Purview agent integrations – Preview

48:20 - Foundry Toolbox and Memory

50:59 - Publish to Teams and M365 Copilot – June GA

50:28 - Azure AI Translator updates – GA

51:27 - Azure AI Speech LLM API – GA

52:54 - Custom Avatar and Custom Video in Foundry – GA

53:30 - Content Understanding in Foundry portal – Preview

53:37 - Foundry Global PTU reservations – GA

53:11 - PII playgrounds – Preview

53:27 - Foundry VS Code extension - GA

54:47 - Alon-1.0 Instruct

54:58 - Alon-1.0 Plan

55:50 - MAI-Thinking-1

55:22 - MAI-Image-2.5 (with Flash variant)

56:33 - MAI-Transcribe-1.5

56:46 - MAI-Voice-2 (with Flash variant coming soon)

58:52 - MAI-Code-1-Flash

58:10 - Majorana 2

59:40 - MDASH

59:26 - Intelligent terminal – Preview

01:00:09 - Work IQ APIs

01:01:07 - Web IQ

01:02:00 - Microsoft Scout, the first Autopilot

01:02:32 - Event Grid MQTT v5 sub identifier - GA

01:02:45 - Close

Tried something new and created a Microsoft AI update for month of May. Would be interested in feedback on maybe changes for future ones.

https://youtu.be/HN12PCVEeuM

00:00 - Introduction

00:19 - New AI videos

00:47 - Models

00:50 - Claude Opus 4.8 - Foundry, Copilot Cowork and GitHub Copilot

02:10 - GPT-5.5 Instant (GPT-chat-latest) & GPT-5.5 Thinking – Microsoft Foundry and M365 Copilot Chat

02:52 - GPT-realtime-2, GPT-realtime-translate, and GPT-realtime-whisper - Foundry

03:37 - xAI Grok 4.3 - Foundry

03:57 - DeepSeek V4, V4 Pro & Kimi 2.6 - Foundry (via Fireworks)

04:45 - Cohere Command A+ and new image models - Foundry

05:17 - MAI-Image-2-Efficient — Foundry Labs

05:54 - Microsoft Foundry

05:57 - Trace-based evaluation for external & hosted agents

06:59 - GPT-5 Reinforcement Fine-Tuning - Gated GA

07:39 - Managed VNet, project cost attribution & Content Understanding - GA

08:17 - Open agentic stack from MS Research - MagenticLite, MagenticBrain, Fara 1.5

09:11 - Foundry Local 1.1 & 1.2 plus azure-ai-projects 2.2.0 SDK

10:13 - Foundry IQ

11:00 - Copilot Studio

11:03 - Computer-using agents

11:34 - New workflow experience

12:24 - M365 Copilot

12:27 - Redesign

12:59 - Implicit Outlook grounding

13:07 - PDFs in chat

13:11 - GitHub Copilot

13:14 - Opus 4.8 & Gemini 3.5 Flash GA, GPT-5.3-Codex, auto model selection

13:34 - GitHub Copilot App – Preview

13:54 - Copilot CLI remote control – GA

14:18 - Organizational model rules - Preview

14:41 - Close

This week's Azure Update is up!

📽️ https://youtu.be/pMfG-vYvnv8

🧾 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azure-weekly-update-22nd-may-2026-john-savill-xpidc/?trackingId=ogg9bm9PQnyhEbNxtvW8Iw%3D%3D

• AKS AppInsight auto-instrumentation (00:28) - You can now enable your apps for App Insights without having to modify your code if its Java running on Node.js. This works in conjunction with the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro.
• App Configuration scorecards (00:53) - Azure App Configuration provides a centralized configuration setting and flag store for application configuration. Scorecards help show how different feature flag variants are performing in production based off captured telemetry via App Insights. You can then use this to understand how the various features are behaving and performing to influence future changes and focus.
• Azure Functions Flex Consumption TLS cert (01:43) - Instead of one cert used for all apps in the same webspace (think of logical container based around region, OS and resource group), these flex certificates get scoped to an individual function app. Each app can hold up to 3 certificates. During preview the recommendation is to use the Azure portal for configuration.
• TLS 1.0 and 1.1 app service retirement (02:20) - With the improvements in TLS 1.2 and later the now legacy versions are being retired. Any client application working with App Service, Functions and Logic Apps must support TLS 1.2 or above prior to the retirement date.
• Azure Front Door WebSocket (03:05) - AFD Standard and Premium SKU now support WebSocket in GA. It’s enabled y default and no additional configuration is required. WebSockets are useful for interactive, real-time scenarios, streaming and more because of its long-lived, full-duplex TCP connectivity.
• NSG and UDR limit updates (03:35) - Virtual networks are updating the maximum numbers of Network Security Groups (that control the flow of traffic) and User Defined Routes. You can now have 2000 security rules per NSG and 6000 addresses or ports per rule. 1000 routes per route table and 600 route tables per subscription. Basically helping to enable higher scale for those complex networks.
• Network Watcher rule impact analyzer (04:22) - Network Watcher shows the impact of NSG or Azure Virtual Network Manager security admin rules can be evaluated on the impact on live traffic before actually applying.
• GW summarized prefixes (05:11) - If you have large virtual network setups your gateways for ExpressRoute or VPN may advertise a large number of IP spaces back to on-premises. With this feature it will summarize those prefixes to a covering prefix, so install of lots of /24 prefixes you can just advertise a /16
• S2S VPN cert auth (06:04) - You can now authenticate S2S VPN connection using certificates instead of the traditional pre-shared key. This can increase security and add resistance to tampering.
• User group specific IP pools P2S VPN (06:20) - You can now assign distinct IP pools based on the authenticating user, e.g. the user group memberships. This helps utilize the network for finer segmentation.
• Azure Blob Storage SDK for Rust (06:45) - Blob is used in so many solutions today and now if you are using the memory-safe Rust programming language you now have a native Software Development Kit (SDK) available for easier integration. This includes Entra-integrated authentication, automatic retires and OpenTelemetry support for full tracing. This joins SDKs for Azure, Identity and Key Vault.
• Azure Storage Action mock runs (07:28) - Azure Storage Actions are a powerful way to perform operations at scale across blob and data lake. You define conditions and then actions which can then be executed on assigned storage accounts. This also means the impact of a mistake can be vast. With mock runs it will show which objects WOULD be impacted without actually impacting them. This allows you to tweak before true execution.
• ANF cache volumes (08:27) - These are cloud caches of an external source NetApp ONTAP or Cloud Volumes ONTAP storage volumes (for example instances in other clouds like AWS or GCP or other ANF volumes in Azure). The cache resides in the cloud containing the most used (hot) data reducing latency but also saving cost in accessing the same data over connections repeatedly.
• ANF object REST API (09:18) - This provides an S3 compatible REST API enables seamless integration with many services including Microsoft Fabric via shortcuts that avoids any data duplication or movement but also other S3 speaking systems which opens up many new opportunities over analytics, AI, business intelligence and more.
• Azure Storage Mover blob-to-blob (09:59) - You can now use Azure Storage Mover to transfer between blob containers making it easy to move blob content between subscriptions, regions and storage accounts. It works for both flat and hierarchical namespace (so data lake support). It can be configured in just a few steps.
• Azure Storage Mover schedule update (10:21) - Also for storage mover you can now opt to do a one-time migration (so no schedule) or setup a recurrence at a daily, weekly or monthly cadence. This gives a lot more flexibility for keeping consistency across environments.
• Azure Files Entra-only identity (10:41) - You can now enable access to Azure Files SMB shares using Entra only identities which removes the previous requirement of the identities being sync’d from Active Directory, i.e. a hybrid identity. Kerberos authentication can now be used with cloud-only Entra identities which is great where you don’t have AD. The huge benefit is the ability to take advantage of the granular RBAC on the SMB file share content based on the NTFS ACLs.
• Event Grid subscription identifiers (11:28) - Now a client that is subscribing to events with MQTT can see the identifier for the filter that triggered the delivery. This is useful if a client subscribes to many topics which means now the client can make decisions on the processing path depending on that identifier. Maybe it needs to go to a log, maybe to a dashboard.
• Event Grid updates (12:09) - In GA are other updates around MQTT capabilities that work with the subscription identifier. This includes retain support to better support new subscribers to a topic by sharing the last known good value of a topic, shared subscriptions to better scale and distribute traffic via a group of clients and also publish of MQTT messages using standard HTTP requests.
• Cosmos DB LangChain and LangGraph integration (12:39) - This new python package makes it easy to use Cosmos DB for vector and hybrid search through LangChain and LangGraph which obviously is huge for AI scenarios.
• SQL Server on Azure VM new regions (12:59) - This is part of the ability to deploy and manage SQL instances on Azure VMs managed through the SQL iaaS agent extension and Arc-enabled machines. This is now also available in Malaysia West and Indonesia Central which can be important for specific data residency requirements.
• Azure PostgreSQL Flex token refresh update (13:24) - Entra ID token refresh update is now available in Python, .NET and JavaScript when talking to PostgreSQL using Entra integrated authentication.
• Foundry role updates (13:44) - A number of roles in Microsoft Foundry have been updated with its rebranding from Azure AI Foundry. So now we have Foundry Account Owner, Foundry Owner, Foundry User and Foundry Project Manager. Foundry Account Owners and Owners can now assign the following roles to themselves and others – Foundry User, Log Analytics Reader and two Container Registry focused roles.
• New Foundry Model Router models (14:24) - One of the biggest challenges is which model to use based on the prompt. Do you need a small, fast, cheaper model or a large, deep reasoning, more expensive model based on complexity, task type etc. The model router provides a single endpoint to send prompts to that automatically sends to the most appropriate model based on the prompt to optimize performance and spend. It now adds gpt-5.4, gpt-5.4-mini, gpt-5.4-nano, gpt-5.3-chat, Claude-Opus-4.7, gpt-5.5, and grok-4.1-fast-reasoning to the models it can use as possible selections. Now up to 28 possible usable models! They also added a new open-source auto-evaluation repository that helps evaluate how the model router is performing. This is separate from the existing Foundry evaluations that help ensure your AI applications are staying fit for purpose and not regressing.
• Azure Linux 4.0 (15:59) - Azure Linux has been around for a while, originally CBL-Mariner but was really focused on being a very light weight, hardened OS host for containers. With 4.0 we have a split. Azure Linux 4.0 is available for Azure VMs and WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) as a Linux OS to use. It is derived from Fedora, open sourced and maintained by Microsoft. It is free and the kernel is optimized for use on Azure infrastructure. They also have GA’d Azure Container Linux based on the immutable Flatcar project specifically for container hosts.

New AI-901 Azure Fundamentals Study Cram is up!

https://youtu.be/a-yuXz_uV30

00:00 - Introduction

00:37 - Study resources

02:49 - What is AI

05:30 - Assistants and agents

07:15 - Responsible AI

09:35 - Azure and Entra

13:20 - Microsoft Foundry

15:42 - Models

20:09 - Agents

21:20 - Tools and knowledge

21:36 - Looking at an agent

23:55 - Endpoints, keys and Entra auth

26:35 - App integration with Foundry

29:05 - Foundry generated code

31:04 - Custom AI app

35:56 - Generative AI

41:23 - Embeddings

43:04 - Other AI services

43:36 - Natural Language Processing

50:18 - Speech

53:49 - Computer vision

56:26 - Image and video generation

1:00:12 - Information extraction

1:03:56 - Summary

1:06:25 - Close

This week's update is up! Quick update.

📽️ https://youtu.be/yoVH_44xb_E

📄 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azure-weekly-update-15th-may-2026-john-savill-fyspc/

• ACA Express (01:07) - Azure Container Apps is a great capability to host rich containerized apps and microservices without having to manage Kubernetes or other components BUT there is some provisioning time and overhead. Sometimes you just want a fast app hosting, especially with agents that spin up fast on demand. Azure Container Apps Express is built exactly for these simpler requirements and removes infrastructure decisions. You bring a container image and you are done. It provisions in seconds, sub-second cold starts, scale to zero with per second billing. So run your agents, MCP servers, SaaS apps, APIs. You name it!
• AVNM rule impact analyzer (02:28) - This is a great capability as its always scary to implement changes and what may break. This enables you to simulate changes to your security admin rules (that are applied before any vnet NSG) and will show how existing traffic would be impacted. You could then modify to avoid actual traffic impact.
• Azure Files SMB MI support (03:15) - Azure Files SMB has Entra integration for authentication and now also work with managed identities that are tied to resources and avoid the use of secrets or keys enhancing security. For example your pipeline, container workload, process in a VM can now all access an Azure Files share using their resource-based identity.
• ANF large file support (04:21) - Azure NetApp Files now supports file sizes up to 64 TiB for regular volumes. This is important when you look at certain workloads, for example hosting a virtual hard disk for virtualization. This works across all service levels.
• Azure Service Bus Premium with AZ 4 9s SLA (04:42) - For Azure Service Bus Premium namespaces that are deployed in regions with Availability Zones you now have a 4 9’s SLA for the service.
• Azure Service Bus Premium confidential compute (04:57) - Also the use of confidential compute (where the workload is encrypted in use, i.e. CPU and memory) is now available in Korea Central and UAE North. This gives the complete, hard-ware backed and attested encryption from storage, over the network to that actual processing.
• Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana (05:42) - Grafana brings really powerful visualization capabilities via their dashboards and these can now be integrated into the Azure Portal. This means you get all the Azure Monitor telemetry alongside telemetry from Prometheus (think containers), data explorer, resource graph and more.
• Codename MDASH (06:10) - Many customers I talk to ask about getting access to Claude Mythos Preview which thanks to its advanced coding capabilities is great at finding vulnerabilities and its very locked down as part of project glasswing. Microsoft now have a Multi-moDel Agentic Scanning Harness, MDASH which uses over 100 specialized AI agents to discover, debate and prove exploitable bugs end-to-end and out performs the single model Mythos. The great news is you can sign-up and utilize as part of a private preview. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/05/12/defense-at-ai-speed-microsofts-new-multi-model-agentic-security-system-tops-leading-industry-benchmark/
• Grok 4.3 in Foundry (07:18) - Grok 4.3 is xAIs latest flagship model designed for agent and productivity focuses workflows. It has great tool calling, instruction following and lower hallucinations. 200K token context window and is available as global standard deployment. Obviously being in Foundry you can then take advantage of all the governance, security, private networking, identity, agent hosting, memory as a service, evaluations and more that you actually need to make AI apps trusted and usable.

Every C‑level conversation I’ve had this quarter has centered on one theme: Can we trust the outputs of generative AI?
Not just the models, but the data feeding them.

In this video, I break down one of the most important (and overlooked) dimensions of AI trust:
creating a complete, virtualized view of your enterprise data estate.
I also touch on how to ensure AI solutions are fit for purpose and safe through capabilities like evaluations.

A unified data virtualization layer gives you a single, AI‑enabled interface to your data; no matter where it lives, how it’s structured, or which system owns it.
This is how organizations move from siloed insights to intelligence at enterprise scale.

🔗 Video: https://youtu.be/J08rfw4UBfY

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

00:31 - AI and the new pressure on data

04:50 - Silos of data

07:55 - Data virtualization layer

09:10 - Fabric OneLake

13:39 - Single namespace and workspaces

14:26 - Shortcuts

15:55 - Types of data

18:54 - Shortcuts outside of OneLake

20:32 - Managed transformations

21:43 - Mirroring

23:38 - Single virtualized enterprise data layer

24:40 - Governance

25:42 - Semantic models

27:47 - Intelligence for AI

28:38 - Summary

This week's Azure Update is up!

YouTube - https://youtu.be/wdYy3sLnfHA

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azure-weekly-update-8th-may-2026-john-savill-mcwac/

• Azure Functions consumption durable task scheduler (00:50) - The consumption SKU charges on for actions dispatched which makes it great for any event-driven type activity. It now has support for the durable task scheduler which provides the storage provider to enable fault tolerant code execution including retries and persistent state. This means its great for distributed transactions, multi-agent orchestration, data processing and more. You use it with Durable Functions.
• Azure Reserved VM size retirements (01:29) - Starting July 1, 2026, purchases and renewals will no longer be available for one-year Azure Reserved VM Instances for the Av2, Amv2, Bv1, D, Ds, Dv2, Dsv2, F, Fs, Fsv2, G, Gs, Ls, and Lsv2 VM series. Additionally, one-year and three-year reserved instances (RIs) for the Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3, and Esv3 VM series will no longer be available for purchase and renewal.
• Bulk Azure Backup VM restore (02:11) - You can now restore up to 100 VMs in a single operation which makes it easier to support large-scale recovery scenarios.
• Dl D E v7 SKUs (02:30) - New Intel Xeon 6 processors for both General Purpose and memory-optimized. Generally 20% better compute performance. Dl (low memory) is 2:1 ratio, GP 4:1 and then memory optimized 8:1. These are great for web and regular app servers, databases etc.
• UK egress datacenter changes (03:21) - For Europe there is free egress and at-cost data transfer for transfer from Azure to another service provider. There are some changes coming for UK related to the scoping of networks, services and transfer windows. You should verify your use and contact support where needed.
• ACS AlternateId cleanup (03:51) - For those using Multiple Number Assignment Azure Communication Services feature for Teams Phone it is important to NOT use this AlternateId for non valid values. This can cause failures. Therefore its use should be ceased for all customers.
• App GW for Containers add-on for AKS Automatic (04:36) - AKS Automatic can be easily deploy and use Application Gateway for Containers via the add-on removing manual steps and getting the best managed ingress and load balancing solution.
• Elastic SAN AVS Gen2 private cloud (05:14) - Azure Elastic SAN provides an iSCSI target built on native Azure Storage. Azure VMWare Solution Gen 2 private clouds (which live in Azure virtual networks which simplify networking and a lot more) can now use Azure Elastic SAN for storage and because of the vnet integration no ExpressRoute gateway so no throughput limitations caused by connectivity related components and instead can maximize the Elastic SAN. This includes the use of the AV64 SKUs.
• Elastic SAN single volume snapshot (06:29) - You can now create point-in-time snapshots of individual volumes and they are delta based so only the changes are stored optimizing space. These are co-located on the source SAN so can be restored very quickly.
• ANF backup enabled by default (06:57) - New volumes will now have backup enabled by default when creating new volumes but you can opt-out if desired.
• Premium SSD v2 in 3 AZs Japan West (07:11) - The v2 with separate capacity, IOPS and throughput is available in 3 AZs Japan West.
• Cosmos DB spherical quantization (07:31) - Spherical quantization is an advanced vector compression technique designed to preserve search quality while improving vector indexing and search performance.
• Cosmos DB shell (08:03) - Cosmos DB Shell is an open-source bash-like command-line interface enabling easy developer interaction with Cosmos DB database and provides a local shell MCP Server enabling easy local AI assistant interaction via the shell. You can navigate your database hierarchy like a file system and easily run SQL commands. Available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
• SQL MI BC right-size memory (08:51) - SQL MI Business Critical now has flexible memory which enables you to customize the vCPU to memory ratio to better meet your needs and pay for the memory you actually need. This has been available for non-BC for a while, and this modification is an online operation.
• GPT-chat-latest in Foundry (09:22) - This is GPT-5.5 Instant and designed for chat, retrieval, and tool‑integrated workflows, it enables systems that stay grounded in enterprise data, take action across tools, and handle end‑to‑end interactions more reliably. It has big gains in factual accuracy, tool calling and response efficiency. When the app needs multi-turn conversations with good instruction following with external tool use this is a great fit.
• Azure Document Intelligence v3 API retirement (10:01) - Use the v4 before the retirement.
• GPT realtime models (10:11) - Three new realtime models. GPT-realtime-translate, GPT-realtime-whisper which enable live, multilingual capabilities with whisper transcribing speech and then translate for multi-lingual abilities. Also GPT-realtime-2 is a reasoning speech to speech model with adjustable levels of reasoning which means it can pause while working through the problem before speaking. The ability to realtime translate can be key to supporting many types of live event and support assistants with the reasoning ability of realtime-2 being used for more complex voice interactions.