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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

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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

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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.

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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