Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

New options for AI-powered innovation, resiliency, and control with Microsoft Azure

Organizations running mission‑critical workloads operate under stricter standards because system failures can often affect people and business operations at scale. They must ensure control, resilience, and operational autonomy such that innovation does not compromise governance. They need agility that also maintains continuity and preserves standards compliance, so they can get the most out of AI, scalable compute, and advanced analytics on their terms.

For example, manufacturing plants need assembly lines to continue to operate during network outages, and healthcare providers need the ability to access patient data during natural disasters. Similarly, government agencies and critical infrastructure operators must comply with regulations to keep systems autonomous and data within national borders. Additionally, regulations sometimes mandate that sensitive data remains stored and processed locally under local jurisdiction and personnel control.

These are exactly the challenges Azure’s adaptive cloud approach is designed to solve. We are extending Azure public regions with options that adapt to our customers’ evolving business requirements without forcing trade-offs. Microsoft’s strategy spans both our public cloud, private cloud, and edge technology, giving customers a unified platform for operations, applications, and data with the right balance of flexibility and control. This approach empowers customers to use Azure services to innovate in environments under their full control, rather than maintaining separate, siloed, or legacy IT systems.

Meeting unique operational and data sovereignty needs

To address unique operational and data sovereignty needs, Microsoft introduced Azure Local—Azure infrastructure delivered in customers’ own datacenters or distributed locations. Azure Local comes with integrated compute, storage, and networking services and leverages Azure Arc to extend cloud services across the management, data, application, and security layers into hybrid and disconnected environments.

Learn more about what’s new in Azure Local

Over the past six months, our team has significantly expanded Azure Local’s capabilities to meet requirements across industries. We are seeing tremendous momentum from customers like GSK, a global biopharma leader extending cloud innovation and AI to the edge using Azure Local. GSK is enabling real-time data processing and AI inferencing across vaccine and medicine manufacturing and R&D labs worldwide. GSK joined our What’s new in Azure Local session at Ignite last month, offering insight into how they are using Azure Local.

We are also engaging deeply with public sector organizations to ensure essential services can run independent of internet connectivity when needed, from city administrations to defense and emergency response agencies.

To support these customers, we are enabling a growing set of Azure Local features and functionalities across Microsoft and partners, many of which have reached General Availability (GA) and preview.

Microsoft 365 Local (GA) delivers full productivity—email, collaboration, and communications—within a private cloud, ensuring sovereignty and security for sovereign scenarios.

Next-gen NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs (GA) bring high-performance AI workloads on premises, enabling advanced analytics and generative AI without sacrificing compliance.

Azure Migrate support for Azure Local (GA) streamlines lift-and-shift migrations, reducing costs and accelerating time-to-value.

AD-less deployments, Rack-Aware Clustering, and external SAN storage integration (Preview) offer more options for identity, fault tolerance, and flexible storage strategies.

Rack aware clustering is now available in preview for Azure Local

Multi-rack deployments (Preview) dramatically increase options for high scale, supporting larger IT estates in a single integrated Azure Local instance.

Disconnected operations (Preview) delivers a fully disconnected Azure Local experience for mission-critical environments where internet connectivity is infeasible or unwanted.

In short, Azure Local has rapidly evolved into a robust platform for operational sovereignty. It delivers Azure consistency for all workloads from core business apps to AI, in customers’ locations—from a few nodes on a factory floor up to thousands of nodes. These advancements reflect our commitment to meet customers where they are. 

Intelligent and connected physical operations

Azure’s adaptive cloud approach helps bring AI to physical operations. Our Azure IoT platform enables asset-intensive organizations to harness data from devices and sensors in a secure, scalable, and resilient fashion. When combined with Microsoft Fabric, customers get real-time insights from their operational data. This integration allows industries such as manufacturing, energy, and industrial operations to bridge digital and physical systems and adopt AI and automation in ways that align with their specific needs.

Demonstrating how the cloud, edge AI, and simulation can help orchestrate human-robotic collaboration on manufacturing product lines at Microsoft Ignite

Our approach to enable AI in physical operations environments follows two basic patterns. Azure IoT Operations enables device and sensor data from larger sites to be aggregated and processed close to its source for near real-time decision-making and reduced latency, streaming only relevant data to Fabric for more advanced analytics. Azure IoT Hub, on the other hand, enables device data to securely flow directly to Fabric with cloud-based identity and security. The integration across Microsoft Fabric and Azure IoT helps bridge Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT), delivering cost-effective, secure, and repeatable outcomes.

In the last six months, we introduced several enhancements to Azure IoT tailored for connected operations use cases:

In Azure IoT Hub, a new Microsoft-backed X.509 certificate management capability provides enhanced secure identity lifecycle control. Integration with Azure Device Registry streamlines identity, security, and policy management across fleets.

Enhanced Azure Device Registry capabilities improve asset registration, classification, and monitoring for operational insight while allowing Azure connected assets and devices to be used with any Azure service.

Azure Device Registry (ADR) acts as the unified control plane for managing both physical assets from Azure IoT Operations and devices from Azure IoT Hub

Azure IoT Operations’ latest release includes a number of new features. WebAssembly-powered data graphs enable fast, modular analytics for near-instant decision-making. Expanded connectors for OPC UA, ONVIF, REST/HTTP, SSE, and MQTT simplify interoperability. OpenTelemetry endpoint support enables smooth telemetry pipelines and monitoring. Advanced health monitoring provides deep visibility and control over operational assets.

In Microsoft Fabric, Fabric IQ and Digital Twin Builder turn raw telemetry into actionable context for simulation and intelligent feedback loops thanks to the use of models and knowledge graphs that bring clarity to streaming data.

Customers like Chevron and Husqvarna are scaling Azure IoT Operations from single-site pilots to multi-site rollouts, unlocking new use cases such as predictive maintenance and worker safety. These deployments demonstrate measurable impact and adaptive cloud architectures delivering business value. Our partner ecosystem is also growing with Siemens, Litmus, Rockwell Automation, and Sight Machine building on the platform.

Managing a distributed estate with unified Azure management and security

Organizations often grapple with the complexity of highly distributed IT estates—spanning on-premises datacenters, hundreds or sometimes thousands of edge sites, multiple public clouds, and countless devices. Managing and securing this sprawling ecosystem is challenging with traditional tools. A core promise of Azure’s adaptive cloud approach is helping to simplify centralized operations through a single, unified control plane via Azure Arc.

Over the last six months, we have delivered a wave of improvements to help customers manage distributed resources at scale, across heterogenous environments, in a frictionless way. Key enhancements in our Azure Arc platform include:

Azure Arc site manager (Preview) organizes resources by physical site for easier monitoring and management of distributed operations.

New GCP connector (Preview) projects Google Cloud resources into Azure for a single pane of glass across Azure, AWS, and GCP.

The Multicloud connector enabled by Azure Arc is now in preview for GCP environments

Azure Machine Configuration (GA) enforces OS-level settings across Azure Arc-managed servers for compliance and security.

New Azure policies to audit and configure Windows Recovery environment to be ready for critical patch to recover from machine unbootable state such as faulty drivers.

New subscription level enrollment of essential machine management services with a simplified pricing model and a unified user experience from Azure for the hybrid environment, lowering adoption barrier for legacy environments.

Workload Identity (GA) lets Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters use Entra ID for secure resource access, eliminating local storage of secrets.

AKS Fleet Manager (Preview) integrates Azure Arc-connected clusters for centralized policy sync and deployments across hybrid environments.

Azure Key Vault Secret Store Extension (GA) allows Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters to cache secrets from Azure Key Vault, improving security and workload resiliency to intermittent network connectivity for hybrid workloads.

These enhancements underscore our belief that cloud management and cloud-native application development should not stop at the cloud. Whether an IT team is responsible for five datacenters or 5000 retail sites, Azure provides the tooling to manage that distributed environment and develop applications as one cohesive and adaptive cloud.

Azure’s adaptive cloud approach gives organizations the freedom to innovate on their terms while maintaining control. In an era defined by uncertainty, whether from cyber threats or geopolitical shifts, Azure empowers customers to modernize confidently without sacrificing resiliency or control.

Innovate on an adaptive cloud

The post New options for AI-powered innovation, resiliency, and control with Microsoft Azure appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Azure networking updates on security, reliability, and high availability

Enabling the next wave of cloud transformation with Azure Networking

The cloud landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driven by the exponential growth of AI workloads and the need for seamless, secure, and high-performance connectivity. Azure Network services stand at the forefront of this transformation, delivering the hyperscale infrastructure, intelligent services, and resilient architecture that empower organizations to innovate and scale with confidence.

Get the latest Azure Network services updates here

Azure’s global network is purpose-built to meet the demands of modern AI and cloud applications. With over 60 AI regions, 500,000+ miles of fiber, and more than 4 petabits per second (Pbps) of WAN capacity, Azure’s backbone is engineered for massive scale and reliability. The network has tripled its overall capacity since the end of FY24, now reaching 18 Pbps, ensuring that customers can run the most demanding AI and data workloads with uncompromising performance.

In this blog, I am excited to share about our advancements in data center networking that provides the core infrastructure to run AI training models at massive scale, as well as our latest product announcements to strengthen the resilience, security, scale, and the capabilities needed to run cloud native workloads for optimized performance and cost.

AI at the heart of the cloud

AI is not just a workload—it’s the engine driving the next generation of cloud systems. Azure’s network fabric is optimized for AI at every layer, supporting long-lasting, high-bandwidth flows for model training, low-latency intra-datacenter fabrics for GPU clusters, and secure, lossless traffic management. Azure’s architecture integrates InfiniBand and high-speed Ethernet to deliver ultra-fast, lossless data transfer between compute and storage, minimizing training times and maximizing efficiency. Azure’s network is built to support workloads with distributed GPU pools across datacenters and regions using a dedicated AI WAN. Distributed GPU clusters are connected to the services running in Azure regions via a dedicated and private connection that uses Azure Private Link and hardware based VNet appliance running high performant DPUs.

Azure Network services are designed to support users at every stage—from migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud, to modernizing applications with advanced services, to building cloud-native and AI-powered solutions. Whether it’s seamless VNet integration, ExpressRoute for private connectivity, or advanced container networking for Kubernetes, Azure provides the tools and services to connect, build, and secure the cloud of tomorrow.

Resilient by default

Resiliency is foundational to Azure Networking’s mission. We continue to execute on the goal to provide resiliency by default. In continuing with the trend of offering zone resilient SKUs of our gateways (ExpressRoute, VPN, and Application Gateway), the latest to join the list is Azure NAT Gateway. At Ignite 2025, we announced the public preview of Standard NAT Gateway V2 which offers zone redundant architecture for outbound connectivity at no additional cost. Zone Redundant NAT gateways automatically distribute traffic to available zones during an outage of a single zone. It also supports 100 Gbps of total throughput and can handle 10 million packets per second. It is IPv6 ready out of the gate and provides traffic insights with flow logs. Read the NAT Gateway blog for more information.

Pushing the boundaries on security

We continue to advance our platform with security as the top mission, adhering to the principles of Secure Future Initiatives. Along these lines, we are happy to announce the following capabilities in preview or GA:

DNS Security Policy with Threat Intel: Now generally available, this feature provides smart protection with continuous updates, monitoring, and blocking of known malicious domains.

Private Link Direct Connect: Now in public preview, this extends Private Link connectivity to any routable private IP address, supporting disconnected VNets and external SaaS providers, with enhanced auditing and compliance support.

JWT Validation in Application Gateway: Application Gateway now supports JSON Web Token (JWT) validation in public preview, delivering native JWT validation at Layer 7 for web applications, APIs, and service-to-service (S2S) or machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. This feature shifts the token validation process from backend servers to the Application Gateway, improving performance and reducing complexity. This capability enables organizations to strengthen security without adding complexity, offering consistent, centralized, secure-by-default Layer 7 controls that allow teams to build and innovate faster while maintaining a trustworthy security posture.​

Forced tunneling for VWAN Secure Hubs: Forced Tunnel allows you to configure Azure Virtual WAN to inspect Internet-bound traffic with a security solution deployed in the Virtual WAN hub and route inspected traffic to a designed next hop instead of directly to the Internet. Route Internet traffic to edge Firewall connected to Virtual WAN via the default route learnt from ExpressRoute, VPN or SD-WAN. Route Internet traffic to your favorite Network Virtual Appliance or SASE solution deployed in spoke Virtual Network connected to Virtual WAN.

Providing ubiquitous scale

Scale is of utmost importance to customers looking to fine tune their AI models or low latency inferencing for their AI/ML workloads. Enhanced VPN and ExpressRoute connectivity, and scalable private endpoints further strengthen the platform’s reliability and future-readiness.

ExpressRoute 400G: Azure will be supporting 400G ExpressRoute direct ports in select locations starting 2026. Users can use multiple of these ports to provide multi-terabit throughput via dedicated private connection to on-premises or remote GPU sites.

High throughput VPN Gateway: We are announcing GA of 3x faster VPN gateway connectivity with support for single TCP flow of 5Gbps and a total throughput of 20 Gbps with four tunnels.

High scale Private Link: We are also increasing the total number of private endpoints allowed in a virtual network to 5000 and a total of 20,000 cross peered VNets.

Advanced traffic filtering for storage optimization in Azure Network Watcher: Targeted traffic logs help optimize storage costs, accelerate analysis, and simplify configuration and management.

Enhancing the experience of cloud native applications

Elasticity and the ability to scale seamlessly are essential capabilities Azure customers who deploy containerized apps expect and rely on. AKS is an ideal platform for deploying and managing containerized applications that require high availability, scalability, and portability. Azure’s Advanced Container Networking Service is natively integrated with AKS and offered as a managed networking add-on for workloads that require high performance networking, essential security and pod level observability.

We are happy to announce the product updates below in this space:

eBPF Host Routing in Advanced Container Networking Services for AKS: By embedding routing logic directly into the Linux kernel, this feature reduces latency and increases throughput for containerized applications.

Pod CIDR Expansion in Azure CNI Overlay for AKS: This new capability allows users to expand existing pod CIDR ranges, enhancing scalability and adaptability for large Kubernetes workloads without redeploying clusters.

WAF for Azure Application Gateway for Containers: Now generally available, this brings secure-by-design web application firewall capabilities to AKS, ensuring operational consistency and seamless policy management for containerized workloads.

Azure Bastion now enables secure, simplified access to private AKS clusters, reducing setup effort and maintaining isolation and providing cost savings to users.

These innovations reflect Azure Networking’s commitment to delivering secure, scalable, and future-ready solutions for every stage of your cloud journey. For a full list of updates, visit the official Azure updates page.

Get started with Azure Networking

Azure Networking is more than infrastructure—it’s the catalyst for foundational digital transformation, empowering enterprises to harness the full potential of the cloud and AI. As organizations navigate their cloud journeys, Azure stands ready to connect, secure, and accelerate innovation at every step.

All updates in one spot
From Azure DNS to Virtual Network, stay informed on what's new with Azure Networking.

Get more information here

The post Azure networking updates on security, reliability, and high availability appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Introducing Claude Opus 4.5 in Microsoft Foundry

We’re at a real inflection point in the AI landscape, a threshold where models move from useful assistants to genuine collaborators. Models that understand the objective, factor in constraints, and execute complex multi-tool workflows. Models that not only support processes, but help restructure them for reliability, scale, and operational efficiency.

Anthropic’s newest model, Claude Opus 4.5, embodies that shift. Today, we are excited to share that Opus 4.5 is now available in public preview in Microsoft Foundry, GitHub Copilot paid plans, and Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Start building with Claude in Microsoft Foundry

Building on the Microsoft Ignite announcement of our expanded partnership with Anthropic, Microsoft Foundry delivers its commitment to giving Azure customers immediate access to the widest selection of advanced and frontier AI models of any cloud. Foundry empowers developers to accelerate innovation with an integrated, interoperable, and secure AI platform that enables seamless deployment, integration, and scaling for AI apps and agents.

We’re excited to use Anthropic Claude models from Microsoft Foundry. Having Claude’s advanced reasoning alongside GPT models in one platform gives us flexibility to build scalable, enterprise-grade workflows that move far beyond prototypes.
—Michele Catasta, President, Replit

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Opus 4.5 for real work

Opus 4.5 sets a new bar for coding, agentic workflows, and enterprise productivity: outperforming Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1, at a more accessible price point. Its versatility across software engineering, complex reasoning, tool use, and vision unlocks new opportunities for organizations to modernize systems, automate critical workstreams, and deliver ROI faster.

By prioritizing rapid integration of the latest models, Foundry allows Azure customers to stay ahead of the curve and maximize the impact of their agentic AI systems; all while maintaining centralized governance, security, and observability at scale.

1. Built for production engineering and agentic capabilities

According to Anthropic, Opus 4.5 delivers state-of-the-art performance on industry standard software engineering benchmarks, including new highs on SWE-bench (80.9%). Early testers consistently describe the model as being able to interpret ambiguous requirements, reason over architectural tradeoffs, and identify fixes for issues that span multiple systems.

Opus 4.5 accelerates engineering velocity by completing multi-day development work in hours with:

Improved multilingual coding performance

More efficient code generation

Stronger test coverage

Cleaner architectural and refactoring choices

Capability / BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.5Claude Sonnet 4.5Claude Opus 4.1Gemini 3 ProAgentic coding (SWE-bench Verified)80.90% 77.20% 74.50% 76.20% Agentic terminal coding (Terminal-bench 2.0)59.30% 50.00% 46.50% 54.20% Agentic tool use — Retail (t2-bench)88.90%86.20%86.80% 85.30% Agentic tool use — Telecom (t2-bench)98.20% 98.00%71.50% 98.00% Scaled tool use (MCP Atlas)62.30% 43.80% 40.90%_Computer use (OSWorld) 66.30% 61.40% 44.40% _Novel problem solving (ARC-AGI-2 Verified) 37.60% 13.60% _31.10% Graduate-level reasoning (GPQA Diamond) 87.00% 83.40% 81.00% 91.90% Visual reasoning (MMMU validation) 80.70% 77.80% 77.10%_Multilingual Q&A (MMLU) 90.80% 89.10% 89.50%91.80% 

Claude Opus 4.5 benchmark results from Anthropic

Opus 4.5 is also one of the strongest tool-using models available today, capable of powering agents that work seamlessly across hundreds of tools. Developers gain access to several important upgrades:

Programmatic Tool Calling: Execute tools directly in Python for more efficient, deterministic workflows.

Tool Search: Dynamically discover tools from large libraries without using up space in the context window.

Tool Use Examples: More accurate tool calling for complex tool schemas.

Together, these capabilities enable sophisticated agents across cybersecurity, full-stack software engineering, financial modeling, and other workflows requiring multiple tool interactions. Opus 4.5 shows strong, real-world intelligence applying these tools creatively within constraints. In testing, the model successfully navigated complex policy environments, such as airline change rules, chaining upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and rebookings to optimize outcomes. This kind of adaptive, constraint-aware problem-solving reflects a meaningful step forward in what agentic AI systems can accomplish.

Manus deeply utilizes Anthropic’s Claude models because of their strong capabilities in coding and long-horizon task planning, together with their prowess to handle agentic tasks. We are very excited to be using them now on Microsoft Foundry!
—Tao Zhang, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Manus AI

2. Improved developer experience on Foundry

Opus 4.5 paired with new developer capabilities offered on Foundry is designed to help teams build more effective and efficient agentic systems:

Effort Parameter (Beta): Control how much computational effort Claude allocates across thinking, tool calls, and responses to balance performance with latency and cost for your specific use cases.

Compaction Control: Handle long-running agentic tasks more effectively with new SDK helpers that manage context efficiently over extended interactions.

These enhancements provide greater predictability and operational control for enterprise workloads.

3. Enhanced office productivity and computer use

Opus 4.5 also doubles down as Anthropic’s best vision model, unlocking workflows that depend on complex visual interpretation and multi-step navigation. Computer use performance has improved significantly, enabling more reliable automation of desktop tasks.

For knowledge workers, the model delivers a step-change improvement in powering agents that create spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. It produces work with consistency, professional polish, and genuine domain awareness making it a fit for finance, legal, and other precision-critical verticals. The model better leverages memory to maintain context and consistency across files throughout sprawling professional projects.

4. Safety and security

According to Anthropic, Opus 4.5 also delivers meaningful improvements in safety and security. The model shows a reduced rate of misaligned responses, stronger robustness against prompt-injection attacks, and more reliable behavior across complex tasks.

These improvements align with Microsoft’s commitment to providing enterprise customers with models that meet high bars for safety, governance, and operational integrity

Use cases

Opus 4.5 serves the following use cases

Software development: Deploy agents that handle complex, multi-system development tasks with minimal supervision.

Financial analysis: Connect insights across regulatory filings, market reports, and internal data for sophisticated predictive modeling and proactive compliance monitoring.

Cybersecurity: Correlate logs, vulnerability databases, and threat intelligence for professional-grade threat detection and automated incident response.

Enterprise operations: Manage sophisticated workflows requiring coordination across multiple tools, systems, and information sources.

Pricing and availability

Opus 4.5 delivers frontier performance and sets a new standard for a variety of use cases at one third the price of previous Opus-class models.

Model
Offer typeDeployment type
Regions
Price (1M tokens)
Availability

Claude Opus 4.5

Serverless Pay-go

Global Standard

East US2, Sweden Central
Input- $5Output- $25November 24, 2025 (public preview)

Get started today

Claude Opus 4.5 is available now in Microsoft Foundry and coming soon in Visual Studio Code via the Foundry extension. Visit the Foundry portal to begin building with Opus 4.5.

The post Introducing Claude Opus 4.5 in Microsoft Foundry appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Foundry: Scale innovation on a modular, interoperable, and secure agent stack

One year ago, at Microsoft Ignite, we set out to redefine enterprise intelligence with Foundry. Our conviction was clear: software would evolve beyond rigid workflows, becoming systems that reason, adapt, and act with purpose. We envisioned developers moving from prescriptive logic to shaping intelligent behavior.

Today, that transformation is accelerating across industries and organizations of every size. The shift is tangible: agents are no longer just assistants, they are dynamic collaborators, seamlessly integrated into the tools we use every day. For builders, agents are reshaping software, and we are delivering a platform that empowers every developer and every business to embrace this moment with confidence and control.

Microsoft Foundry helps builders everywhere turn vision into reality with a modular, interoperable, and secure agent stack. From code to cloud, today demonstrates our focus on empowering developers with a powerful, simple—and trusted—path to production AI apps and agents. Here is the TL;DR:

Foundry Models added new models from Anthropic, Cohere, NVIDIA, and more. Model router is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry and in public preview in Foundry Agent Service. 

Foundry IQ, now in public preview, reimagines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as a dynamic reasoning process, simplifying orchestration and improving response quality. 

Foundry Agent Service now offers Hosted Agents, multi-agent workflows, built-in memory, and the ability to deploy agents directly to Microsoft 365 and Agent 365 in public preview. 

Foundry Tools, empowers developers to create agents with secure, real-time access to business systems, business logic, and multimodal capabilities.

Foundry Control Plane, now in public preview, centralizes identity, policy, observability, and security signals and capabilities for AI developers in one portal. GitHub Advanced Security and Microsoft Defender integration, now in public preview, helps improve collaboration between security and development teams across the full app lifecycle.

Foundry Local, now in private preview on Android, the world’s most widely used mobile platform.

Managed Instance on Azure App Service, now in public preview, helps organizations move their web applications to the cloud with just a few configuration changes. 

Next-level productivity: AI-powered tools for builders

It all starts with developers, and GitHub is the world’s largest developer community, now serving over 180 million developers. AI-powered tools and agents in GitHub are helping developers move faster, build increasingly innovative apps, and modernize legacy systems more efficiently. More than 500 million pull requests were merged using AI coding agents this year, and with AgentHQ, coding agents like Codex, Claude Code, and Jules will be available soon directly in GitHub and Visual Studio Code so developers can go from idea to implementation faster. GitHub Copilot, the world’s the most popular AI pair programmer, now serves over 26 million users, helping organizations like Pantone, Ahold Delhaize USA, and Commerzbank streamline processes and save time.

Over the last year, developers have moved from experimentation to production. They need tools that let them design, test, monitor, and improve intelligent systems with the same confidence they have in traditional software. That’s why we built a new generation of AI-powered tools: GitHub Agent HQ for unified agent management, Custom Agents to encode domain expertise, and “bring your own models” to empower teams to adapt and innovate. With Copilot Metrics, teams evolve with data, not guesswork.

We’re committed to giving every developer the tools to design, test, and improve intelligent systems, so they can turn ideas into impact, faster than ever. Managed Instance on Azure App Service, now in public preview, lets organizations move existing .NET applications to the cloud with only a few configuration changes.

Enter Microsoft Foundry: The AI app and agent factory

Enterprises need a consistent foundation to build intelligence at scale. With Microsoft Foundry, we’re unifying models, tools, and knowledge into one open system, empowering organizations to run high-performing agent fleets and intelligent workflows across their business.

Today, teams can choose from over 11,000 frontier models in Foundry, including optimized solutions for scale and specialized models for scientific and industrial breakthroughs. I’m proud to announce Rosetta Fold 3, a next-generation biomolecular structure prediction model developed with the Institute for Protein Design and Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab. Models like these enable researchers and enterprises to tackle the world’s hardest problems with state-of-the-art technology.

Build AI agents with Microsoft Foundry

Here is our top Ignite news for Foundry:

1. Use the right model for every task with Foundry Models

Innovation thrives on adaptability and choice. With more than 11,000 models, Microsoft Foundry offers the broadest model selection on any cloud. Foundry Models empowers developers to benchmark, compare, and dynamically route models to optimize performance for every task.

Today’s announcements include:

Starting today, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5 models are available in Foundry, advancing our mission to give customers choice across the industry’s leading frontier models, and making Azure the only cloud offering both OpenAI and Anthropic models. Also this week, Cohere’s leading models join Foundry’s first-party model lineup, providing ultimate model choice and flexibility.

Model router (generally available) enables AI apps and agents to dynamically select the best-fit model for each prompt—balancing cost, performance, and quality. Plus, in model router in Foundry Agent Service (public preview), enables developers to build more adaptable and efficient agents; particularly helpful for multi-agent systems. model router in Foundry Agent Service (public preview), enables developers to build more adaptable and efficient agents; particularly helpful for multi-agent systems.

A new Developer Tier (public preview) makes model fine-tuning more accessible by leveraging idle GPU capacity.

Optimize AI performance with Foundry Models

2. Empower agents with knowledge using Foundry IQ

The more context an agent has, the more grounded, productive, and reliable it’s likely to be. Foundry IQ, now available in public preview, reimagines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as a dynamic reasoning process rather than a one-time lookup. Powered by Azure AI Search, it centralizes RAG workflows into a single grounding API, simplifying orchestration and improving response quality while respecting user permissions and data classifications.

Key features include:

Simplified cross-source grounding with no upfront indexing.

Multi-source selection, iterative retrieval, and reflection to dynamically improve the quality of agent interactions.

Foundry Agent Service integration to enrich agent context in a single, observable runtime.

Foundry already powers more than 3 billion search queries per day. By combining Foundry IQ with Microsoft Fabric IQ and Work IQ from Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft provides an unparalleled context layer for agents, helping them connect users with the right information at the right time to make informed decisions.

Start building reliable agents with Foundry IQ

3. Build context-aware, action-oriented agents with Foundry Agent Service

To be force multipliers, agents need access to the same tools and knowledge as the people they support. Foundry Agent Service empowers developers to create sophisticated single and multi-agent systems, connecting models, knowledge, and tools into a single, observable runtime.

Today’s announcements include:

Hosted Agents (public preview) enable developers to run agents built with Microsoft frameworks or third-party frameworks in a fully managed environment, so they can focus on agent logic rather than operational overhead.

Multi-agent workflows (public preview) coordinate specialized agents to execute multi-step business processes using either a visual designer or a code-first API. Workflows enable long-running, stateful collaboration with recovery and debugging built-in.

Memory (public preview) enables agents to securely retain context across sessions, reducing external data-store complexity and enabling more personalized interactions out-of-the-box.

Microsoft 365 and Agent 365 integration (public preview) enables developers to instantly deploy agents from Foundry to Microsoft productivity apps, making it easier to reach users directly within the M365 ecosystem while leveraging Agent 365 for secure orchestration, governance, and enterprise-grade deployment.

Create multi-agent systems with Foundry Agent Service

4. Enable agents to take action using Foundry Tools

The right tools can transform agents from simple responders into intelligent problem-solvers. With Foundry Tools, now in public preview, developers can provide agents with secure, real-time access to business systems, business logic, and multimodal capabilities to deliver business value.

Now, developers can:

Find, connect, and manage public or private MCP tools for agents from a single, secure interface.

Enable agents to act on real-time business data and events using more than 1,400 connectors with business systems such as SAP, Salesforce, and UiPath.

Enrich workflows with out-of-the-box tools such as transcription, translation, and document processing.

Expose any API or function as an MCP tool via API Management, reusing existing business logic to accelerate time-to-value.

Enable AI agents with MCP tools with Foundry Tools

5. Advancing security and trust with Foundry Control Plane 

Scaling intelligence requires trust. As organizations rely on agents and AI powered systems for more of their workflows, teams need clearer visibility, stronger guardrails, and faster ways to identify and address risk. This year we’re expanding security and governance with two key announcements: Foundry Control Plane, now in public preview in Microsoft Foundry, and a new integration between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security, also in public preview. Together they give developers and security teams a more connected way to monitor behavior, guide access, and keep AI systems safe across the full lifecycle.

Foundry Control Plane brings identity, controls, observability, and security together in one place so teams can build, operate, and govern agents with confidence. Key capabilities include: 

Controls that apply unified guardrails across inputs, outputs, and tool interactions to keep agents focused, accurate, and within defined boundaries. 

Observability with built in evaluations, OTel based tracing, continuous red teaming, and dashboards that surface insights on quality, performance, safety, and cost. 

Security anchored in Entra Agent ID, Defender, and Purview to provide durable identity, policy driven access, integrated data protection, and real-time risk detection across the agent lifecycle. 

Fleet wide operations that unify health, cost, performance, risk, and policy coverage for every agent, no matter where it was built or runs, with alerts that surface issues the moment they appear empowering developers to take action. 

Defender for Cloud + GitHub Advanced Security integration 

Developers and security teams often work in separate tools and lack shared signals to prioritize risks. The new Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security integration closes this gap. Developers receive AI suggested fixes directly inside GitHub, while security teams track progress in Defender for Cloud in real time. This gives both sides a faster, more connected way to identify issues, remediate them, and keep AI systems secure throughout the app lifecycle. 

Secure your code with GitHub and Microsoft Defender

6. Foundry Local Comes to Android: Powering Cloud to Edge  

Six months ago, we launched Foundry Local on Windows and Mac. In that short time, it’s reached 560 million devices, making it one of the fastest-growing runtimes in enterprise history. Leading organizations like NimbleEdge, Morgan Stanley, Dell, and Pieces are already using Local to bring intelligence directly into the environments where work happens, from financial services to healthcare and edge computing.

Today, we’re taking the next step. Foundry Local is now in private preview on Android, the world’s most widely used mobile platform. This means agents can run natively on billions of phones, unlocking real-time inference, privacy-aware computation, and resilience, even where connectivity is unpredictable. 

We’re also announcing a new partnership with PhonePe, one of India’s fastest-growing platforms. Together, we’ll bring agentic experiences into everyday consumer applications, showing how Local can transform not just enterprise workflows, but daily life at massive scale. 

7. Modernize your web apps for the era of AI in weeks, not months 

We see customers building net new AI applications and integrating AI into existing applications. Both require a modern foundation. Managed Instance on Azure App Service, available in public preview, lets organizations move their .NET web applications to the cloud with just a few configuration changes, saving the time and effort of rewriting code. The result is faster migrations with lower overhead, and access to cloud-native scalability, built-in security and AI capabilities in Microsoft Foundry.

Migrate your web apps with Managed Instance on Azure App Service

Learn more and get started with Foundry

We hope you join us at Microsoft Ignite 2025, in-person or virtually, to see these new capabilities in action and learn how they can support your biggest ambitions for your business.

Explore Microsoft Foundry.

Watch our Innovation Session: Your AI Apps and Agent Factory.

Watch all recorded sessions at Ignite.

Chat with us on Discord.

Provide feedback on GitHub.

The post Microsoft Foundry: Scale innovation on a modular, interoperable, and secure agent stack appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Azure at Microsoft Ignite 2025: All the intelligent cloud news explained

Before joining Microsoft, I spent years helping organizations build and transform. I’ve seen how technology decisions can shape a business’s future. Whether it’s integrating platforms or ensuring your technology strategy stands the test of time, these choices define how a business operates, innovates, and stays ahead of the competition.

Today, business leaders everywhere are asking:

How do we use AI and agents to drive real outcomes?

Is our data ready for this shift?

What risks or opportunities come with AI and agents?

Are we moving fast enough, or will we fall behind?

This week at Microsoft Ignite 2025, Azure introduces solutions that address those questions with innovations designed for this very inflection point.

It’s not just about adopting the right tools. It’s about having a platform that gives every organization the confidence to embrace an AI-first approach. Azure is built for this moment, with bold ambitions to enable businesses of every size. By unifying AI, data, apps, and infrastructure, we’re delivering intelligence at scale.

If you’re still wondering if AI can really deliver ROI, don’t take my word for it; see how Kraft Heinz, The Premier League, and Levi Strauss & Co. are finding success by pairing their unique data with an AI-first approach.

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With these updates, we’re making it easier to build, run, and scale AI agents that deliver real business outcomes.

TLDR—the Ignite announcement rundown

On the go and want to get right to what’s new and how to learn more? We have you covered. Otherwise, keep reading for a summary of top innovations from the week.

If you want to make AI agents smarter with enterprise context…Microsoft Fabric IQPreviewMicrosoft Foundry IQPreviewMicrosoft Foundry new tool catalogPreviewIf you want a simple, all-in-one agent experience…Microsoft Agent FactoryAvailable nowIf you want to modernize and extend your data for AI–wherever it lives…SAP BDC Connect for Microsoft FabricComing soonAzure HorizonDBPreviewAzure DocumentDBAvailable nowSQL Server 2025Available nowIf you want to operate smarter and securely with AI-powered control…Foundry Control PlanePreviewAzure Copilot with built-in agentsPreviewNative integration for Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced SecurityPreviewIf you want to build on an AI-ready foundation…Azure BoostAvailable nowAzure Cobalt 200Coming soon

Your AI and agent factory, expanded: Microsoft Foundry adds Anthropic Claude and Cohere models for ultimate model choice and flexibility 

Earlier this year, we brought Anthropic models to Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Copilot Studio. Today, we’re taking the next natural step: Claude Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5 are now part of Microsoft Foundry, advancing our mission to give customers choice across the industry’s leading frontier models—and making Azure the only cloud offering both OpenAI and Anthropic models. 

This expansion underscores our commitment to an open, interoperable Microsoft AI ecosystem—bringing Anthropic’s reasoning-first intelligence into the tools, platforms, and workflows organizations depend on every day.

Read more about this announcement

This week, Cohere’s leading models join Foundry’s first-party model lineup, enabling organizations to build high-performance retrieval, classification, and generation workflows at enterprise scale.

With these additions to Foundry’s 11,000+-model ecosystem—alongside innovations from OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Mistral AI, Black Forest Labs, and Microsoft Research—developers can build smarter agents that reason, adapt, and integrate seamlessly with their data and applications. 

Make AI agents smarter with enterprise context

In the agentic era, context is everything because the most useful agents don’t just reason, they’re capable of understanding your unique business. Microsoft Azure brings enterprise context to the forefront, so you can connect agents to the right data and systems—securely, consistently, and at scale. This set of announcements makes that real.

GPT‑5.1 in Foundry

Read more

Microsoft Fabric IQ turns your data into unified intelligence

Fabric IQ organizes enterprise data around business concepts—not tables—so decision-makers and AI agents can act in real time. Now in preview, Fabric IQ unifies analytics, time-series, and operational data under a semantic framework.

Because all data resides in OneLake, either natively or via shortcuts and mirroring, organizations can realize these benefits across on-premises, hybrid, and multicloud environments. This speeds up answering new questions and building processes, making Fabric the unified intelligence system for how enterprises see, decide, and operate.

Discover how Fabric IQ can support your business

Introducing Foundry IQ, which enables agents to understand more from your data

Now in preview, Foundry IQ makes it easier for businesses to connect AI agents to the right data, without the usual complexity. Powered by Azure AI Search, it streamlines how agents access and reason over both public and private sources, like SharePoint, Fabric IQ, and the web.

Instead of building custom RAG pipelines, developers get pre-configured knowledge bases and agentic retrieval in a single API that just works—all while also respecting user permissions. The outcome is agents that understand more, respond better, and help your apps perform with greater precision and context.

Build and control task forces of agents at cloud scale

Read Asha's blog

Back to the top

Agents, simplified: Microsoft Agent Factory, powered by Azure

This week, we’re introducing Microsoft Agent Factory—a program that brings Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ together to help organizations build agents with confidence.

With a single metered plan, organizations can use Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio to build with IQ. This means you can deploy agents anywhere, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, without upfront licensing or provisioning.

Azure delivers large scale cluster

Read more

Eligible organizations can also tap into hands-on support from top AI Forward Deployed Engineers and access tailored, role-based training to boost AI fluency across teams.

Confidently build agents with Microsoft Agent Factory

Modernize and extend your data for AI—wherever it lives

Great AI starts with great data. To succeed, organizations need a foundation that’s fast, flexible, and intelligent. This week, we introduced new capabilities to help make that possible.

Introducing Azure HorizonDB, a new fully managed PostgreSQL database service for faster, smarter apps

Now in preview, HorizonDB is a cloud database service built for speed, scale, and resilience. It runs up to three times faster than open-source PostgreSQL and grows to handle demanding storage requirements with up to 15 replicas running on auto-scaling shared storage.

Whether building new AI apps or modernizing core systems, HorizonDB delivers enterprise-grade security and natively integrated AI models to help you scale confidently and create smarter experiences.

Azure DocumentDB offers AI-ready data, open standards, and multi-cloud deployments

Now generally available, Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL service built on open-source tech and designed for hybrid and multicloud flexibility. It supports advanced search and vector embeddings for more accurate results and is compatible with popular open-source MongoDB drivers and tools.

sovereign cloud capabilities

Read more

SQL Server 2025 delivers AI innovation to one of the world’s most widely used databases

The decades-long foundation of innovation continues with the availability of SQL Server 2025. This release helps developers build modern, AI-powered apps using familiar T-SQL—securely and at scale.

With built-in tools for advanced search, near real-time insights via OneLake, and simplified data handling, businesses can finally unlock more value from the data they already have. SQL Server 2025 is a future-ready platform that combines performance, security, and AI to help teams move faster and work smarter.

Start exploring SQL Server 2025

Fabric goes further

SQL database and Cosmos DB in Fabric are also available this week. These databases are natively integrated into Fabric, so you can run transactional and NoSQL workloads side-by-side, all in one environment.

Get instant access to trusted data with bi-directional, zero copy sharing through SAP BDC Connect for Fabric

Fabric now enables zero-copy data sharing with SAP Business Data Cloud, enabling customers to combine trusted business data with Fabric’s advanced analytics and AI—without duplication or added complexity. This breakthrough gives you instant access to trusted, business-ready insights for advanced analytics and AI.

We offer these world-class database options so you can build once and deploy at the edge, as platform as a service (PaaS), or even as software as a service (SaaS).And because our entire portfolio is either Fabric-connected or Fabric-native, Fabric serves as a unified hub for your entire data estate.

Strengthen the databases at the heart of your data estate

Read Arun's blog

Back to the top

Operate smarter and more securely with AI-powered control

We believe trust is the foundation of transformation. In an AI-powered world, businesses need confidence, control, and clarity. Azure provides that with built-in security, governance, and observability, so you can innovate boldly without compromise.

With capabilities that protect your data, keep your operations transparent, and make environments resilient, we announced updates this week to strengthen trust at every layer.

Unified observability helps keep agents secure, compliant, and under your control

One highlight from today’s announcements is the new Foundry Control Plane. It gives teams real-time security, lifecycle management, and visibility across agent platforms. Foundry Control Plane integrates signals from the entire Microsoft Cloud, including Agent 365 and the Microsoft security suite, so builders can optimize performance, apply agent controls, and maintain compliance.

New hosted agents and multi-agent workflows let agents collaborate across frameworks or clouds without sacrificing enterprise-grade visibility, governance, and identity controls. With Entra Agent ID, Defender runtime protection, and Purview data governance, you can scale AI responsibly with guardrails in place.

Azure Copilot: Turning cloud operations into intelligent collaboration

Azure Copilot is a new agentic interface that orchestrates specialized agents across the cloud management lifecycle. It embeds agents directly where you work—chat, console, or command line—for a personalized experience that connects action, context, and governance.

We are introducing new agents that simplify how you run on the cloud—from migration and deployment to operations and optimization—so each action aligns with enterprise policy. 

Migration and modernization agents deliver smarter, automated workflows, using AI-powered discovery to handle most of the heavy lifting. This shift moves IT teams and developers beyond repetitive classification work so they can focus on building new apps and agents that drive innovation.

Similarly, the deployment agent streamlines infrastructure planning with guidance rooted in Azure Well-Architected Framework best practices, while the operations and optimization agents accelerate issue resolution, improve resiliency, and uncover cost savings opportunities.

Learn more about these agents in the Azure Copilot blog

Secure code to runtime with AI-infused DevSecOps

Microsoft and GitHub are transforming app security with native integration for Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security. Now in preview, this integration helps protect cloud-native applications across the full app lifecycle, from code to cloud.

GitHub Universe 2025

Read more

This enables developers and security teams to collaborate seamlessly, allowing organizations to stay within the tools they use every day.

Streamline cloud operations and reimagine the datacenter

Read Jeremy's blog

Build on an AI-ready foundation

Azure infrastructure is transforming how we deliver intelligence at scale—both for our own services and for customers building the next generation of applications.

At the center of this evolution are new AI datacenters, designed as “AI superfactories,” and silicon innovations that enable Azure to provide unmatched flexibility and performance across every AI scenario.

THE first AI superfactory

Read more

Azure Boost delivers speed and security for your most demanding workloads

We’re announcing our latest generation of Azure Boost with remote storage throughput of up to 20 GBps, up to 1 million remote storage IOPS, and network bandwidth of up to 400 Gbps. These advancements significantly improve performance for future Azure VM series. Azure Boost is a purpose-built subsystem that offloads virtualization processes from the hypervisor and host operating system, accelerating storage and network-intensive workloads.

Azure Cobalt 200: Redefining performance for the agentic era

Azure Cobalt 200 is our next-generation ARM-based server, designed to deliver efficiency, performance, and security for modern workloads. It’s built to handle AI and data-intensive applications while maintaining strong confidentiality and reliability standards.

By optimizing compute and networking at scale, Cobalt 200 helps you run your most critical workloads more cost-effectively and with greater resilience. It’s infrastructure designed for today’s demands—and ready for what’s next.

See what Azure Cobalt 200 has to offer

Keeping you at the frontier with continuous innovation

We’re delivering continuous innovation in AI, apps, data, security, and cloud. When you choose Azure, you get an intelligent cloud built on decades of experience and partnerships that push boundaries. And as we’ve just shown this week, the pace of innovation isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

Back to the top

Agentic enterprise, unlocked: Start now on Microsoft Azure

I hope Ignite—and our broader wave of innovation—sparked new ideas for you. The era of the agentic cloud isn’t on the horizon; it’s here right now. Azure brings together AI, data, and cloud capabilities to help you move faster, adapt smarter, and innovate confidently.

I invite you to imagine what’s possible—and consider these questions:

What challenges could you solve with a more connected, intelligent cloud foundation?

What could you build if your data, AI, and cloud worked seamlessly together?

How could your teams work differently with more time to innovate and less to maintain?

How can you stay ahead in a world where change is the only constant?

Want to go deeper into the news? Check out these blogs:

Microsoft Foundry: Scale innovation on a modular, interoperable, secure agent stack by Asha Sharma.

Azure Databases + Microsoft Fabric: Your unified and AI-powered data estate by Arun Ulagaratchagan.

Announcing Azure Copilot agents and AI infrastructure innovations by Jeremy Winter.

Ready to take the next step?

Explore technology methodologies and tools from real-world customer experiences with Azure Essentials.

Check out the latest announcements for software companies.

Visit the Microsoft Marketplace, the trusted source for cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents.

The post Azure at Microsoft Ignite 2025: All the intelligent cloud news explained appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Announcing Azure Copilot agents and AI infrastructure innovations

In this article

Agentic cloud operations: Introducing Azure CopilotAzure’s AI infrastructure: The backbone of modernizationBuilding for trust: Resiliency, operational excellence, and securityWhat does modernizing workloads look like today?Looking ahead

The cloud is more than just a platform—it’s the engine of transformation for every organization. This year at Microsoft Ignite 2025, we’re showing how Microsoft Azure modernizes cloud infrastructure at global scale—built for reliability, security, and performance in the AI era.

Streamline cloud operations with Azure Copilot

From scalable compute to resilient networks and AI-powered operations, Azure provides the foundation that helps customers innovate faster and operate with confidence. Our strategy is anchored in three key areas, each designed to help customers thrive in a rapidly changing landscape:

We’re strengthening Azure’s global foundation. We’re expanding capacity and resilience across regions while optimizing datacenter design, power efficiency, and network topology for AI-scale workloads. Our services are zone-redundant by default, our edge footprint is growing to meet low-latency needs, and security and compliance controls are embedded at every layer. From confidential computing and sovereign cloud architectures to our security capabilities, Azure is engineered for trust by design.

We’re modernizing every workload. We’re advancing compute, network, storage, application, and data services with Microsoft Azure Cobalt and Azure Boost systems, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Automatic, and Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL. We embrace and integrate with Linux, Kubernetes, and open-source ecosystems customers rely on.

We’re transforming how teams work. We’re embedding AI agents directly into the platform through Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot, bringing agent-based capabilities for migration, app modernization, troubleshooting, and optimization. These features remove repetitive tasks so teams can focus on architecture instead of administration, making an integral part of how Azure runs end-to-end.

Agentic cloud operations: Introducing Azure Copilot

Azure is entering a new era where AI becomes the foundation for running your cloud. As environments grow more complex, traditional tools and manual workflows can’t keep up. This brings us to a frontier moment, where AI and cloud converge to redefine operations. We call this agentic cloud ops: a new model for the AI era.  

What is Azure Copilot?

Azure Copilot is a new agentic interface that orchestrates specialized agents across the cloud management lifecycle, automating migration, optimization, troubleshooting, and more, freeing up teams to focus on innovation.

Azure Copilot aligns actions—human or agent—with your policies and standards, offering a unified framework for compliance, auditing, and enforcement that respects role-based access control (RBAC) and Azure Policy. It provides strong governance and data residency controls, full visibility across agents and workloads, and lets you bring your own storage for complete control of chat and artifact data. To make the operating model truly agentic, we’re introducing six Azure Copilot agents—migration, deployment, optimization, observability, resiliency, and troubleshooting—in gated preview.

Learn more about Azure Copilot in our detailed blog, and learn how to sign up for the preview.

Sign up for the Azure Copilot preview

Azure’s AI infrastructure: The backbone of modernization

Azure is built for reliable, world-class performance, delivering at global scale and speed.

With more than 70 regions and hundreds of datacenters, Azure provides the largest cloud footprint in the industry. This unified infrastructure supports consistent performance, capacity, and compliance for customers everywhere.

AI infrastructure that delivers performance and scale

We’ve reimagined how our datacenters are built and operated to support the critical needs of the largest AI challenges. In September 2025, we launched Fairwater, our largest and most sophisticated AI datacenter to date, and our newest site in Atlanta now joins Wisconsin to form a planet-scale “AI superfactory.” By using high-density liquid cooling, a flat network architecture linking hundreds of thousands of GPUs, and a dedicated AI WAN backbone, we’re giving customers unmatched capacity, flexibility, and utilization across every AI workload.

Azure is the first cloud provider to deploy NVIDIA’s GB300 GPUs at scale, extending our leadership from GB200 and continuing to define the infrastructure foundation for the AI era. Each Fairwater site connects hundreds of thousands of these best-in-class GPUs, millions of CPU cores, and massive storage—enough to hold 80 billion 4K movies.

A key part of this evolution is our AI WAN—a high-speed network linking Fairwater and other Azure datacenters to move data quickly and coordinate massive AI jobs across sites. It’s engineered to keep GPUs busy, reduce bottlenecks, and scale workloads beyond the limits of a single location, so customers can tackle bigger projects and get results faster. Driving down costs through innovation, we’ve set a new benchmark for secure, high-performance AI: Azure processed more than 1.1 million tokens per second for language models—the equivalent of writing seven books per second from a single rack.

Azure’s AI infrastructure puts supercomputing-level power in every customer’s hands—enabling larger model training, faster deployment, and broader user reach within a trusted, compliant environment.

Extending AI infrastructure innovation to your workloads

An exciting part of our work on AI datacenters is that the same architectural breakthroughs that allow us to train frontier models also strengthen Azure’s core services, directly benefiting all workloads.

One of these examples is Azure Boost, which offloads virtualization processes traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host operating system onto purpose-built hardware and software. Combined with our new AMD “Turin” and Intel “Granite Rapids” virtual machines—plus the latest network-optimized and storage-optimized families—customers are seeing more than 20 GB per second of managed-disk throughput and more than a million input/output operations per second (IOPS). More than a quarter of our global fleet is now Boost-enabled, and network throughput has doubled to 400 gigabits per second for our general-purpose and AI SKUs. The infrastructure investments we’ve talked about are already being used by leading-edge companies to bring services to billions of users.

Cloud-native apps and data

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) delivers secure, managed Kubernetes with automated upgrades and scaling. Paired with cloud-native databases like PostgreSQL and Cosmos DB, teams build faster and recover instantly.

We’re doing the work to bridge the power of the AI infrastructure into AKS by enabling cutting-edge GPUs to function as AKS nodes out of the box or actively monitoring their health.

We haven’t stopped at the infrastructure layer. We’re also reinventing how easy it is to take advantage of Kubernetes itself. That’s why we introduced AKS Automatic. It embeds best practices, automates infrastructure provisioning, and operates critical Kubernetes components to reduce complexity and improve reliability. It handles the hard parts—patching, upgrades, observability, and security—so teams can focus on innovation instead of infrastructure.

With AKS Automatic-managed system node pools, we’re making AKS Automatic even lower-touch because now you don’t have to run critical Kubernetes components yourself. It’s entirely managed by the service. It moves key services like CoreDNS and metrics server to Microsoft-managed infrastructure, making it even easier to focus entirely on your apps.

You not only need easy-to-use application infrastructure; you also need easy-to-use data tools for your applications. We’re introducing Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL, which brings breakthrough scalability and AI integration for next-generation applications. Azure DocumentDB is now generally available—the first managed database built on the open-source engine we contributed to the Linux Foundation.

We are also excited to expand our longstanding partnership with SAP and announce the launch of SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Microsoft Fabric, simplifying access to data sharing across both platforms. Read the announcement blog to learn more.

Azure Databases and Microsoft Fabric
Learn more about the next generation of Microsoft’s databases, announced at Microsoft Ignite 2025.

Read the blog

Building for trust: Resiliency, operational excellence, and security

The world runs on Azure’s cloud infrastructure. Every business, government, and developer depends on it to be reliable, secure, and always available. That responsibility drives everything we do in Azure. Our mission is to build the most efficient, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure platform of the AI era, one that customers can depend on every day.

Resiliency is not just a feature. It is a design principle, a culture, and a shared commitment between Microsoft and our customers. Every region, service, and operation is built with that responsibility in mind.

At Microsoft Ignite, we are taking this commitment further with new capabilities that strengthen reliability, simplify operations, and help customers build with greater confidence.

Raising the bar on operational excellence: Operational excellence means reliability is designed from the start. Every Azure region is built with availability zones, redundant networking, and automated fault detection. We are extending that foundation with services like NAT Gateway, now zone-redundant by default for improved network reliability without any configuration required.

Empowering customers: With Azure Resiliency (public preview), we are co-engineering resiliency with customers. This new experience helps teams set recovery objectives, test failover drills, and validate application health, strengthening readiness together before issues arise.

Evolving security for modern threats

We continue to expand Azure’s security foundation with new capabilities that make protection simpler, smarter, and more integrated across the platform. These updates strengthen boundaries, automate defense, and bring AI-powered insight directly into how customers protect and operate their environments.

Simplifying protection: Azure Bastion Secure by Default is built into the platform. It automatically hardens remote access to virtual machines through RDP and SSH, reducing setup time and risk

Strengthening boundaries: Network Security Perimeter, now generally available, provides secure and centralized firewall to control access to PaaS resources.

Better defense: And we’re making advancements in the Web Application Firewall with Captcha for human verification.

All of this builds on Azure’s broader stack of confidential virtual machines, containers, hardware-based attestation, and encryption, supporting protection from hardware through to application.

What does modernizing workloads look like today?

Organizations are on a journey to modernize. Most run a mix of systems that span decades—from mission-critical databases to new cloud-native services. Azure meets customers where they are, helping modernize applications and data with flexibility, openness, and built-in intelligence.

Rather than a one-off effort, modernization is really about re-architecting agility, scaling efficiently, and using AI and open technologies without sacrificing reliability or control.

To help simplify and accelerate the modernization journey, we’re investing to help you find and get to the best destination for your workloads, whether it’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS).

Azure’s agentic migration and modernization tools make it easier than ever to modernize your apps, data, and infrastructure with speed and precision. For example, you can move existing .NET applications directly into a fully managed environment—no refactoring or containers required—into the new App Service Managed Instance (now in preview).

On the data side, the next-generation Azure SQL Managed Instance (now generally available) delivers up to five-times faster performance and double the storage capacity. And Azure Copilot and GitHub Copilot simplify SQL Server, Oracle, and PostgreSQL modernization.

Plus, across infrastructure—from VMware to Linux and IT operations—AI agents streamline migrations, reduce licensing overhead, and automate patching, governance, and compliance, so modernization becomes a repeatable, intelligent motion.

Customers migrating and modernizing to Azure using our agentic tools have shared the impressive results they have experienced. Here are just a few examples:

.NET: More than 500,000 lines of code upgraded and migrated in weeks.

Java: Four times faster modernized applications than before using the agents.

Read more about GitHub Copilot app modernization.

Looking ahead

The promise of the cloud was always about scale, flexibility, and innovation. With our innovations across our infrastructure, datacenters, Azure Copilot, services, and open-source contributions, that promise expands to drive your business forward every day.

The next era of the cloud is inevitable. It’s agentic, intelligent, and human-centered—and Microsoft is helping lead the way.

Join us at Microsoft Ignite where you can tune in to our sessions to learn more:

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: Scale Smarter: Infrastructure for the Agentic Era

Breakouts

End-to-End migration of applications with AI Agents to IaaS and PaaS

Unlock agentic intelligence in the cloud with Copilot in Azure

What’s new and what’s next in Azure IaaS

SQL Server 2025: The AI-ready enterprise database

Scaling Kubernetes securely and reliably with AKS

Inside Azure Innovations with Mark Russinovich

The post Announcing Azure Copilot agents and AI infrastructure innovations appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure