All things Azure

Developer focused how-tos, use cases and solutions on Microsoft Azure

Featured posts

Azure Skills Plugin – Let’s Get Started!
Mar 17, 2026
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Azure Skills Plugin – Let’s Get Started!

Chris Harris

Part 2 of the Azure Skills Plugin series Previously: Announcing the Azure Skills Plugin This post is all about getting you up and running. I won't g...

All things Azure
Platform Engineering for the Agentic AI era
Mar 5, 2026
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Platform Engineering for the Agentic AI era

Arnaud,
davidwright

For the last decade, platform engineering has relied on explicit API interaction layers: CLIs, SDKs, pipelines, wrappers, and UI workflows that translate human ...

All things AzureGitHub CopilotAgents
Context-Driven Development: Agent Skills for Microsoft Foundry and Azure
Jan 21, 2026
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Context-Driven Development: Agent Skills for Microsoft Foundry and Azure

Govind Kamtamneni

Code will be generated, not written. Most enterprise AI workloads are net-new microservices. Modular, greenfield work. Perfect for coding agents. The catch? ...

All things Azure
Claude Code + Microsoft Foundry: Enterprise AI Coding Agent Setup
Dec 2, 2025
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Claude Code + Microsoft Foundry: Enterprise AI Coding Agent Setup

Govind Kamtamneni

This guide covers setting up Claude Code CLI and VS Code extension with Microsoft Foundry, configuring CLAUDE.md for project context, integrating Spec Kit for s...

All things AzureGitHub Copilotgithub
Visualizing GitHub Audit Log in Microsoft Defender
Nov 27, 2025
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Visualizing GitHub Audit Log in Microsoft Defender

Xuefeng,
sombanerjee

Key Observability Trends Around GitHub Security Modern enterprises are increasingly adopting DevSecOps practices, integrating security into every phase...

All things AzuregithubDefender
Codex Azure OpenAI Integration: Fast & Secure Code Development
Jun 17, 2025
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Codex Azure OpenAI Integration: Fast & Secure Code Development

Govind Kamtamneni

Introduction You can now enjoy the same Codex experience in CLI or VS Code with Azure OpenAI support. We've contributed the following five pull requests to mak...

All things AzureDeveloper ProductivityAgents
How to develop AI Apps and Agents in Azure – A Visual Guide
Dec 4, 2024
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How to develop AI Apps and Agents in Azure – A Visual Guide

Govind,
Priyanka

As organizations explore new AI-powered experiences and automated workflows, there's a growing need to move beyond experiments and proofs-of-concept to producti...

All things AzureAgentsApp Development

Latest posts

May 3, 2026
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Removing The Monkey Work of Migration

davidwright,
Arnaud,
Suzanne

Removing The Monkey Work of Migration; in this post we show how Git-Ape analyses an AWS deployment repo and generates an Azure-native replacement, with design critique built in. This post walks through a real migration workflow: start with an AWS deployment repo and end with an Azure deployment repo. The goal isn’t a 1:1 syntax conversion. It’s intent extraction and architecture remapping—agents that read what your deployment does, propose an Azure-native equivalent, and generate deployment-ready artefacts. Along the way, a critique step flags design issues early, before you ship them.   Related...

Apr 21, 2026
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I Wasted 68 Minutes a Day Re-Explaining My Code. Then I Built auto-memory.

Desi Villanueva

~1,900 lines of Python. Zero dependencies. Saves you an hour a day. GitHub → ·  Now give Copilot CLI enhanced context recall. Point it at  and let it cook. 🍳 Are you tired of using the slash /compact command every 10 min? The Context Window Is a Lie Every AI coding agent ships with a big number on the box. 200K tokens. Sounds massive. You could fit an entire codebase in there, right? Here's what actually happens when you start a session: 200,000 tokens — your context window (on paper) -65,000 tokens — MCP tools load at startup (~33%) -10,000 tokens — instruction files ((~5%) ========= ~12...

Apr 21, 2026
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Getting Started with Agentic DevOps – Part 1: Foundations

Ricardo Fiel

This post is the first in a 3-part series: Bookmark this post for quick reference as you start exploring Agentic DevOps. It will be updated as the 3 parts become available. Getting started with Agentic DevOps Agentic DevOps is a new approach to software development where AI-powered agents work alongside your team across the entire software development lifecycle. Unlike traditional AI assistance, these agents go beyond suggestions—they can take on tasks end-to-end, collaborate across tools, and operate across the lifecycle with your guidance and approval. This series is designed as a pract...

Apr 16, 2026
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Best of Both Worlds for Agentic Refactoring: GitHub Copilot + MicroVMs via Docker Sandbox

cindywang

Legacy codebases frequently contain hardcoded logic and complex build scripts that depend on specific filesystem structures, making them notoriously difficult to modernize in isolated environments. Docker Sandbox addresses this challenge through a bidirectional workspace sync that preserves the same absolute paths inside the sandbox as on the host. This means that when a GitHub Copilot agent refactors a legacy Java or .NET application, file references and build outputs remain consistent across the isolation boundary. The result? Modernized code can be moved back to the host without breaking dependencies. Ho...

Apr 15, 2026
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Choosing the Right Azure Hosting Model for AI Agents: A Deep Dive into Foundry Hosted Agents

Reenu Saluja

AI agents are quickly moving from experiments to production‑critical components of modern applications. But while many teams know how to build agents, far fewer are confident they’re hosting them on the right foundation. Most organizations start by deploying agents the same way they deploy microservices—containers, functions, or app services. That approach works initially. But as agents evolve to support long‑running conversations, tool orchestration, stateful workflows, and continuous iteration, infrastructure decisions start to matter in new ways. Azure offers multiple ways to host AI agents, each wit...

Apr 15, 2026
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DevOps Playbook for the Agentic Era

David Sanchez

Practices, Principles, and Strategic Direction Software delivery has entered a new phase. AI agents are no longer confined to autocomplete suggestions in the editor. They are opening pull requests, generating code across multiple files, proposing infrastructure changes, responding to issues with working implementations, and executing multi-step engineering tasks with minimal human intervention. Tools like GitHub Copilot Cloud Agent (coding agent) represent the leading edge of a shift that is transforming how teams design, build, test, and ship software. This is not a future scenario. It is happening now, acro...

Apr 10, 2026
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Putting Agentic Platform Engineering to the test

Arnaud,
davidwright,
Suzanne

In Part 1 of this blog series set the stage for why platform engineering is being reshaped by agentic AI. (read it here) Basically we outline how instead of humans translating intent through layers of CLIs, SDKs, and bespoke workflows, capable agents can interpret natural-language goals and turn them into safe, validated platform actions using well-described APIs and control schemas. That shift changes what “good” looks like for internal platforms, raising the bar on guardrails, policy, and self-service interfaces allowing teams to move faster without sacrificing safety, reliability, or governance. In th...

Apr 1, 2026
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Project Nighthawk: A Research Agent Built for Field Engineering

Diego,
Ray

If you work in field engineering, you know the scenario. A customer is deploying AKS in a regulated environment. They hit an issue during node bootstrapping. They want to know exactly what happens when a node joins the cluster, which components run in which order, and whether the behaviour they're seeing is expected. The question sounds simple. The answer is not. The answer is spread across half a dozen places at once. It's in the source code: AgentBaker, the node controller, cloud-provider-azure. It's in a Microsoft Learn article that's technically correct but three levels of abstraction above what actually r...

Mar 31, 2026
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Building with Azure Skills

Chris Harris

Part 3 of the Azure Skills Plugin series Previously: How to Install the Azure Plugin You've installed the Azure Skills Plugin. The Azure MCP server is running. You have a huge collection of tools and skills at your disposal. So, now what do you actually say to it? This post is a prompt cookbook. Every example below is a real prompt you can type into Copilot Chat (or Copilot CLI, or Claude Code) with the Azure Plugin installed. Each one triggers a specific skill and produces a concrete, actionable result - not generic advice. A note on scope: Azure is huge, and the examples below reflect th...

Mar 25, 2026
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Your Entire Engineering Floor Just Stopped Coding

Desi Villanueva

And the developers running Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI didn't notice... Status Page Says 'Operational.' Your Subagents Say Otherwise. If you're running autonomous agents in any serious capacity, you've experienced this: model provider outages aren't edge cases — they're part of the operating environment. Anthropic has had outages. OpenAI has had outages. Google has had outages. Every major model provider has had the kind of degraded performance that doesn't trigger a status page alert but absolutely kills an agentic coding session. The traditional answer is "wait it out." But if you're a solution...

Mar 23, 2026
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Agentic Platform Engineering with GitHub Copilot

Diego,
Ray

We've talked about the human scale problem and what happens when infrastructure scales but understanding doesn't. If you've been following along, you know the thesis: our tools have outpaced our ability to operate them, and platform engineering is how we're fighting back. But here's the thing - we've been fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. We've been encoding knowledge into runbooks that go stale, documentation that drifts, and tribal expertise that walks out the door when someone takes a new job. What if the platform itself could think alongside us? That's what we mean by agentic platform engine...

Mar 18, 2026
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When Infrastructure Scales But Understanding Doesn’t

Diego,
Ray

We all know this, even if we don't like to admit it: modern infrastructure can scale infinitely, but human understanding doesn't. We've all seen it happen - organizations going from managing dozens of servers to thousands of containers, from deploying weekly to deploying hundreds of times per day, from serving thousands of users to millions. The technology handled the scale beautifully. The humans? Not so much. This is the first industry issue that platform engineering should be addressing: how do we manage infrastructure complexity that has outgrown not just individual cognitive capacity, but our collectiv...

Mar 17, 2026
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From 150 Unread to Zero Stress: Automating Inbox Triage with MCP and GitHub Copilot

Desi Villanueva

Taming the Noisy Inbox: How I Used MCP to Automate Email and Teams Triage How the Model Context Protocol (MCP) turns your AI coding assistant into a workplace productivity engine — connecting Microsoft 365 data to your terminal workflow.   The Problem We All Share If you work in a customer-facing role, you know the feeling. You open your laptop on Monday morning and you’re staring at 150+ unread emails, dozens of Teams threads, and the creeping anxiety that something important is buried in there — a customer escalation, an exec ask, a deadline you forgot about. You start scrolling. You context-switc...

Mar 17, 2026
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Azure Skills Plugin – Let’s Get Started!

Chris Harris

Part 2 of the Azure Skills Plugin series Previously: Announcing the Azure Skills Plugin This post is all about getting you up and running. I won't go deep on capabilities, architecture or anything like that here - that's coming in future posts in this series. The goal is to get the plugin installed, verified, and ready so you can start exploring right away. The Azure Skills Plugin works across many agent hosts including GitHub Copilot CLI, VS Code, and Claude Code. Each install takes under 60 seconds. This post covers all three, what gets installed, and how to verify it's working. 👉 Plugin repo:...

Mar 13, 2026
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The Human Scale Problem in Platform Engineering

Diego,
Ray

We keep doing this thing where we solve a problem, celebrate the victory, then realize we've created three new problems we didn't even know existed. Remember when manually configuring servers was the bottleneck? So we built containers. Great! Now we're orchestrating thousands of them. Remember when monolithic deployments were too slow? So we built microservices. Fantastic! Now we're drowning in distributed system complexity. We solved manual infrastructure provisioning with infrastructure as code. Perfect! Now we're coordinating dozens of Terraform modules across environments and wondering how we got here. ...

Mar 9, 2026
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Announcing the Azure Skills Plugin

Chris Harris

Part 1 of the Azure Skills Plugin series Coding agents like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code are great at code, but getting your app to production on Azure is not just about writing code. Really, it is about making the right calls. Which service fits this app? Which SKU fits this workload? Should this be App Service, Container Apps, Functions, AKS, or something else entirely? What needs to be validated before deploy? Which permissions, quotas, and guardrails matter? That is exactly why skills are taking off: they give agents practical knowledge on demand instead of forcing them to guess. Want to try t...

Mar 5, 2026
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Platform Engineering for the Agentic AI era

Arnaud,
davidwright

For the last decade, platform engineering has relied on explicit API interaction layers: CLIs, SDKs, pipelines, wrappers, and UI workflows that translate human intent into machine‑safe API calls. AI agents are now short‑circuiting much of that stack. By combining natural language understanding, reasoning, and direct access to API specifications and control schemas, agents can convert human intent directly into validated platform actions, often without a bespoke interaction layer in between. Nowhere is this shift more visible than in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and pipeline workflows, where agents are increasi...

Feb 26, 2026
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Measuring actual AI Impact for Engineering with Apache DevLake

Eldrick Wega

If you want to skip the explain and get started super quick with adoption + impact insights, use gh-devlake to deploy a GitHub Copilot impact dashboard in a few CLI commands. So! You've rolled out GitHub Copilot to your engineering teams. You've got the built-in dashboards. You know how many seats are assigned, what the acceptance rates look like, which editors your teams prefer. Maybe you've even pulled the Copilot Metrics API and built some charts. But here's the question your VP of Engineering or CTO is actually asking: "Is GitHub Copilot making us ship faster? Are we more reliable? Is code review g...

Feb 4, 2026
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The OS for Intelligence: How GitHub Bridges the Fragmented AI Landscape

Poornima Prasad

We are currently living through the "fragmentation phase" of the AI revolution. If you’re a developer, you know the drill: You have Claude Code open for reasoning. You have ChatGPT open for logic checks. Then you drop into your terminal to actually build the thing—manually copy-pasting context between three different windows. We call this the "fragmentation tax." It kills momentum, breaks your flow, and frankly, it’s a waste of cognitive energy. For engineering leaders, it’s even worse. It’s a governance nightmare and a silent killer of velocity. GitHub’s answer isn't just another tool; it’s an Op...

Jan 21, 2026
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Context-Driven Development: Agent Skills for Microsoft Foundry and Azure

Govind Kamtamneni

Code will be generated, not written. Most enterprise AI workloads are net-new microservices. Modular, greenfield work. Perfect for coding agents. The catch? Out-of-the-box agents lack domain knowledge about your SDKs and patterns. But frontier LLMs are extraordinarily sample efficient. The patterns you need are already encoded in their latent space from pretraining. All you need is the right activation context. That is what skills do, and Agent Skills ships 126 of them for Azure and Microsoft Foundry development. New: Browse all skills, agents, and documentation at microsoft.github.io/skills. What's in Age...

Jan 7, 2026
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The Realities of Application Modernization with Agentic AI (Early 2026)

jkordick

How to read this article This article is a reflection based on hands-on experience and is written for engineers and technical leaders who are facing a new application modernization effort and want to build a realistic mental model before reaching for tools. If you are new to application modernization, I recommend reading the article end to end. The early sections focus on why modernization is hard in practice and which foundations matter before any technical decisions are made. If you are already familiar with the app modernization space and mainly interested in the role of agentic AI, you can skip the intro...

Dec 18, 2025
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AI Coding Agents and Domain-Specific Languages: Challenges and Practical Mitigation Strategies

Chris Romp

1. Introduction AI coding agents/assistants such as GitHub Copilot have become common in modern software engineering workflows. Their strengths—rapid pattern completion, context-aware suggestions, and the ability to learn style from local code—stem from broad training on large corpora of public, general-purpose code. They perform best when the languages, libraries, and idioms requested by developers align with patterns they have seen many times before. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) break this assumption. DSLs are deliberately narrow, domain-targeted languages with unique syntax rules, semantics, and ...

Dec 4, 2025
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Locking Down MCP: Create a Private Registry on Azure API Center and Enforce It in GitHub Copilot And VS Code

tjsingh85

Ever since MCP launched, every customer has asked the same thing: “How does a private MCP registry actually work, and how do we configure it for our enterprise?”. So today, on a snowy, freezing Friday in Zurich, I grabbed a coffe, opened the GitHub docs, dove into Azure API Center portal, and decided to write the blog I wish already existed.A few hours (and quite a few sighs) later, here I am. The docs are great but they definitely don’t cover all the tiny quirks, hidden settings, and errors you’ll hit along the way. What did the journey look like? This post is the guide I d...

Dec 2, 2025
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Claude Code + Microsoft Foundry: Enterprise AI Coding Agent Setup

Govind Kamtamneni

This guide covers setting up Claude Code CLI and VS Code extension with Microsoft Foundry, configuring CLAUDE.md for project context, integrating Spec Kit for structured development, and running Claude Code in GitHub Actions. Prerequisites Step 1: Deploy Claude Models in Foundry In Microsoft Foundry: Alternative: Model Router Model Router is a Foundry model that intelligently routes each prompt to the best underlying model based on query complexity, cost, and performance. Version supports Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, and Opus 4.1 alongside GPT, DeepSeek, Llama, and Gro...

Nov 27, 2025
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Visualizing GitHub Audit Log in Microsoft Defender

Xuefeng,
sombanerjee

Key Observability Trends Around GitHub Security Modern enterprises are increasingly adopting DevSecOps practices, integrating security into every phase of the development lifecycle. Key observability trends include: Challenges in Displaying All Security in One Dashboard Despite GitHub’s robust security features, customers face several challenges:   Why Visualizing GitHub Audit Logs in Defender Makes Sense Integrating GitHub audit logs into Microsoft Defender offers several advantages:   Microsoft’s solution strategically aligns GitH...

Nov 20, 2025
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Develop Faster with VS Code for the Web – Azure: Your Browser-Based Dev Environment

Meera Haridasa

Developers can now move from idea to Azure-ready code in minutes with VS Code for the Web – Azure. This browser-based environment removes setup time, reduces friction, and gives you immediate access to pre-configured runtimes, GitHub tools, and Azure integrations. As a result, you can start building, editing, and deploying the moment inspiration strikes. For more info, view our VS Code Docs. Build in the Browser with a Ready-to-Use Azure Environment VS Code for the Web – Azure opens directly in your browser, and it loads a workspace that includes Node.js, Python, Java, C#, Git support, and the Azure Develop...

Nov 20, 2025
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Azure DevOps to GitHub migration Playbook: Unlocking Agentic DevOps

Philippe Didiergeorges

Azure DevOps or GitHub Enterprise ? Today, in the Microsoft ecosystem, two Software Development Lifecycle management platforms coexist: - Azure DevOps is designed from the ground up for enterprise with advanced planning features through Azure Boards, build and release automation with Azure Pipelines, and a unique offering for quality teams with Azure Test Plans... - GitHub has evolved with the open-source ecosystem, and its operation is naturally more centered around code repositories, visible by default, and the system of proactive contributions through Forks and Pull Requests. The platform has evolved to...

Nov 14, 2025
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Tutorial Videos: Setting up GitHub Copilot for your Company

Eldrick Wega

This guide shares a series of videos that walk you through setting up GitHub and GitHub Copilot end-to-end for your company. These are especially useful for organizations starting from scratch who want to leverage GitHub Copilot and are looking to get started. These videos were recorded as of October 2025. This article is intentionally brief—just links and essential references so you can dive straight into the content. The videos cover:   Note: Although some experiences may evolve as we streamline our onboarding processes, these videos remain a solid introduction. We will prov...

Nov 4, 2025
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Powering Distributed AI/ML at Scale with Azure and Anyscale

Brendan Burns

The path from prototype to production for AI/ML workloads is rarely straightforward. As data pipelines expand and model complexity grows, teams can find themselves spending more time orchestrating distributed compute than building the intelligence that powers their products. Scaling from a laptop experiment to a production-grade workload still feels like reinventing the wheel. What if scaling AI workloads felt as natural as writing in Python itself? That’s the idea behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework born at UC Berkeley’s RISELab, and now, it’s coming to Azure in a whole new way. Today,...

Oct 31, 2025
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Multi-region Expansion for Azure Deployments

Julian Tanushi

Why Financial Services Organizations Should Consider Expanding to Other Azure Regions for New Workloads As a Cloud Architect, I work closely with financial services organizations to help them unlock the full potential of Azure innovations. One of the most impactful strategies I recommend is adopting a multi-region approach for Azure deployments. While many customers have historically concentrated workloads in a single region—often for simplicity or legacy reasons – the landscape is rapidly changing. Here’s why expanding to other Azure regions for new workloads is not just a technical consideration. It is a strat...

Oct 24, 2025
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Your 6-Step Guide to Deploying a Website with GitHub Codespaces and Copilot agent mode

Shree,
Priyanka

👋everyone! Shree here. I'm sure many of you have had a similar chat with someone you know. We often hesitate to celebrate our achievements because of social perceptions around self-promotion. I believe it’s time to challenge that mindset. Building a personal site is about owning your narrative and showcasing your work with pride. In this post, I’ll show you how to launch your very first personal site (or, a portfolio piece) using GitHub Pages, a simple way to host a static website directly from GitHub. You’ll learn how to create a remote repository, store your site’s code, and deploy it to the web. Plus...

Oct 3, 2025
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From Lab to Live: A Blueprint for a Voice-Powered AI Sales Coach

Aymen Furter

Until recently, building real-time voice AI for production was challenging. Developers faced hurdles such as managing audio streams and ensuring low-latency performance. That landscape is changing. The general availability of the Azure Voice Live API marks a turning point, providing a unified abstraction layer that simplifies the development of real-time voice and avatar experiences. This shift inspired me to build a reference implementation called the AI Sales Coach to demonstrate how these new capabilities can be applied to solve a practical business challenge: skill development. A Practical Appli...

Sep 23, 2025
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Teaching the LLM Good Habits: How Azure MCP Uses Best-Practice Tools

Chris Harris

Why best practices matter (and why many people skip them) Let’s be honest: when you’re in the zone shipping code or wiring up infrastructure, “best practices” can feel like that nagging voice telling you to eat your vegetables. We all know they’re good for us… but in the rush to get things working, they’re often the first thing to fall off the plate. The result? Configurations that work today but explode tomorrow. Pipelines that deploy - until they don’t. Costs that spiral out of control. And sometimes, security gaps big enough to drive a container ship through. That’s why the Azure team invests so heavi...

Sep 4, 2025
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Build your own Microsoft Docs AI assistant with Azure Container Apps and Azure OpenAI

Ricardo M. Martins

Learn how to deploy a self-hosted AI assistant that leverages Microsoft Learn content via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Azure OpenAI. It’s fast, secure, and ready for developer use in real-world apps. Prerequisite This guide assumes you already have an Azure OpenAI resource provisioned in your subscription, with a deployed model (e.g., gpt-4, gpt-4.1, or gpt-35-turbo). If not, follow the Azure OpenAI Quickstart before proceeding. The goal Imagine being able to ask Microsoft Learn, "How do I monitor AKS workloads?" or "What are best practices for Azure Bicep deployments?" and instantly get a precise, ...

Jul 25, 2025
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Azure Container Options: Matching Services to Operational Responsibility

Shree,
Priyanka

Customers are looking to modernize their application on cloud and ask us for guidance on which Azure container services to choose. Should you choose A or B container services or A+B container services? Some choose both (A + B) or use A or B approach. Instead of trying to force fit applications on a container service(s), in this blog post, we show you how to think modular and choose the container service(s) that best meets your application needs and operational responsibility. In other words, you choose the right tool for the right job. In fact, many organizations are gradually transitioning from an A or B min...

Jul 9, 2025
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How We Use AI Agents for COBOL Migration and Mainframe Modernization

jkordick,
gkaleta

Legacy modernization is one of the most frequently raised challenges customers approach us with. They want to eliminate technical debt and run applications cloud-native. Obviously, there are different levels of complexity in legacy modernization, but the most challenging cases remain mainframe languages like COBOL and PL/1. COBOL still powers mission-critical systems in banking, insurance, and government. Modernizing away from the mainframe comes with increased complexity due to fewer experts, rising maintenance costs, and the loss of institutional knowledge — and the millions of lines of code certainly don’t ...

Jul 8, 2025
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Build Biosensing AI-Native Apps on Azure with BCI, AI Foundry, and Agents Service

Govind Kamtamneni

Co‑Author: JD Chibuk, Founder Blueberry X We obsessively track our steps, heart rate, and sleep - but what about our mental state? 🧠 Most of us navigate life blind to how stress, focus, and cognitive overload show up in our physiology. Tools to help capture cognitive indicators can help us change how we think, feel and act in high stress situations for the better. 🤖 Meet Your Cognitive Copilot Imagine an AI agent that quietly observes your indicators relating to cognitive activity, learns your patterns, and supports you in real-time. With breakthrough technologies like fNIRS (functional near-...

Jul 3, 2025
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Automating Secure and Scalable AI Deployments on Azure with HashiCorp

cindywang,
davidwright

While the promise of AI continues to generate momentum, many organizations face a familiar challenge: getting AI projects beyond the prototype phase. According to Gartner, only 30% of AI initiatives make it into production, and RAND reports that up to 80% fail to deliver expected outcomes.   The problem isn’t model quality — it’s platform readiness. To deliver AI successfully, you need more than cloud infrastructure. You need a repeatable, secure, and governed platform built for modern, data-intensive workloads.  The Shift: From Running AI in the Cloud to Building the Cloud for AI   Deploying AI workloads in...

Jun 19, 2025
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Announcing General Availability of GitHub Copilot for Azure—Now with Agent Mode

Yun Jung Choi

Unlocking a New DevOps Era GitHub Copilot for Azure was first introduced at Ignite 2024 as a public preview, empowering developers, IT operators, and DevOps practitioners to leverage natural language to provision, configure, and manage resources within their own Azure environments. Since then, many have used GitHub Copilot for Azure as an AI-powered developer assistant that transforms how they build and manage applications on Azure, directly from Visual Studio Code. Early adopters have shared overwhelming feedback on how it accelerates their Azure development. It flattens the learning curve and helps users st...

Jun 17, 2025
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Codex Azure OpenAI Integration: Fast & Secure Code Development

Govind Kamtamneni

Introduction You can now enjoy the same Codex experience in CLI or VS Code with Azure OpenAI support. We've contributed the following five pull requests to make this possible, giving you the familiar Codex functionality from ChatGPT while running securely on Azure: We are collaborating with OpenAI on additional updates and integrations, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, follow the steps below to get Codex running on your Azure subscription. OpenAI’s Codex CLI is the same coding agent that powers ChatGPT’s Codex. You can now run this coding agent entirely on Azure infrastructure, which keeps your...

Jun 11, 2025
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AI Genius Challenge: Flex your AI skills and beat the clock!

Priyanka Vergadia

If you’ve been following along with the AI Genius Series, you already know we’ve been on a journey, one filled with learning, experimentation, and discovery. We’ve explored the power of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), dived into Copilot deployment, and unlocked the potential of Azure’s AI ecosystem. But now, it’s time to take all that knowledge and put it into action. Now, after popular demand, I’m pleased to launch the AI Genius Challenge.  A fast-paced, hands-on virtual hackathon designed to test your skills, stretch your thinking, and ignite your creativity from everything you have learned in the seri...

May 13, 2025
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Accelerate AI Applications with Semantic Caching on Azure Managed Redis

Satish

In this blog, we will look at implementing the Semantic caching use case using Azure Managed Redis. Azure has been at the forefront of providing caching solutions for over a decade with the Azure Cache for Redis enterprise. This service empowered developers with a high-performance, scalable cache that significantly enhanced the responsiveness of their applications. Now, Azure has taken another significant step forward in this area with its latest offering, AMR, which is currently in public preview. AMR runs on the Redis enterprise stack which offers significant advantages over the community edition of Redis. AMR ...

May 13, 2025
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Eclipse + GitHub Copilot = Lightspeed SAP ABAP Development

Amit Lal

Introduction  Did you catch the GitHub's recent announcement of ABAP support in GitHub Copilot for Eclipse? It is a significant step forward for SAP developers. This integration brings AI-powered code suggestions and chat functionalities directly into the Eclipse IDE, potentially revolutionizing ABAP development. Let's break down how it works, how to set it up, and what it means for enterprise SAP environments.  Setup and Usage  Setting up GitHub Copilot for ABAP in Eclipse is straightforward:  I’ll walk you through the setup step by step in this article — and you can also refer to the...

May 6, 2025
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Reinventing Legacy App Modernization: Crowdbotics’ AI-Native Platform on Azure

Govind Kamtamneni

Author: Charath Ranganathan, CTO, Crowdbotics Modernizing legacy applications is one of the most daunting tasks facing enterprises today. These systems, often built decades ago using technologies like COBOL on mainframes, power critical business functions but are notoriously difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to update or replace. The process typically involves painstaking manual efforts to understand undocumented code, decipher complex interdependencies, and generate mountains of documentation before new requirements can even be drafted. Documenting these systems during a modernization project is furthe...

Apr 9, 2025
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How to build Multi-agent AI Apps using Microsoft Azure

Priyanka Vergadia

Understanding Multi-Agent Workflow Automation  At its core, a multi-agent architecture is like a team of specialized experts working together on complex tasks. Instead of having a single AI agent trying to handle everything, multiple AI agents—each with specific roles and capabilities—collaborate to achieve common goals. Think of it as the difference between having one person juggle all responsibilities versus a well-coordinated team where each member excels at their particular role.  Key Components of Multi-Agent Systems:  1. Specialized Agents   2. Communication Protocol   3...

Apr 1, 2025
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Getting Started with Claude models on Azure Databricks

Govind Kamtamneni

Introduction Following up on the exciting announcement about Anthropic's state-of-the-art models becoming available to Azure Databricks customers, this post provides a detailed, step-by-step guide on how you can start using Claude 3.7 Sonnet model directly within your Azure Databricks environment using Model Serving. We'll walk through deploying the necessary Azure Databricks workspace, finding the Claude 3.7 model endpoint, testing it in the Playground, and getting the code snippets needed to integrate it into your applications. Prerequisites: Step 1: Deploy a Premium Azure Databricks Workspace...

Feb 21, 2025
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Visualize ROI of your GitHub Copilot Usage, Deploy it!

Xuefeng Yin

Deployment: Let's do it! All operations are performed in the VM Prerequisites everything is on-premises and free (except VM) The only thing you need is: Everything else is based on existing stuff, or based on open source software, no extra cost, for example: Docker For installation instructions, refer to Install Docker Engine. For Ubuntu 22.04, you can use the following command verify The following content is obtained, indicating ok Download source code Put all the work in the  ...

Feb 21, 2025
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Visualize ROI of your GitHub Copilot Usage, How it works!

Xuefeng Yin

Architecture: How it works! The Copilot Usage Advanced Dashboard offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to revolutionize how organizations track and analyze their Copilot usage. At its core, the solution leverages Elasticsearch for persistent data storage, breaking free from the traditional 28-day limitation and enabling analysis across extended time periods, from months to years. The system intelligently structures data with Organization and Team fields, facilitating granular filtering and cross-organizational insights. Data integrity is maintained through unique hash key generation...

Feb 10, 2025
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GitHub Copilot Chat Explained: The Life of a Prompt

sombanerjee

Ever wondered what happens behind the scenes when you chat with GitHub Copilot in VS Code? Let's pull back the curtain and explore how this AI coding assistant processes your prompts, from local workspace scanning to interacting with OpenAI's language models.  This article explains how GitHub Copilot extension processes user prompts—including the steps from local VS Code indexing to sending/receiving data from the Copilot proxy and ultimately interacting with OpenAI-based models. The write-up includes what happens when you reference your workspace (e.g., using @workspace) and how many trips occur.   &nb...

Feb 5, 2025
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Turning AI Prompts into Playing Cards: A Platform Engineering Experiment

Taylor Cowan

The inspiration for this project came from my desire to leverage AI to create a tangible product that you can hold, touch, and share.  Cardmaker showcases the capabilities of modern AI as a tool to help its user craft a custom card deck.  But that's not all.  It also provides a unique and tangible product that can be used for educational purposes, marketing, or personal enjoyment.  I’ll let cardmaker introduce itself by showcasing the initial greeting it provides for the user: The Process My first challenge was deciding what theme to use and what content would go on the cards.  This is important because LLM...

Feb 4, 2025
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Step-by-Step Guide: User Provisioning with SAML Authentication in GitHub Enterprise

Joshua Chan

This guide demonstrates how to seamlessly set up user access in GitHub Enterprise using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) authentication. The process connects a user's GitHub account with your organization's identity provider (such as Microsoft Entra ID or Okta), enabling secure and streamlined access management.     The diagram above describes the process when a user access GitHub Enterprise when SAML authentication, the critical piece here is the link with Single Sign-On (SSO) identity.  Assuming the following steps before starting:  Step by step Guide Note...

Jan 30, 2025
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How to use GitHub Copilot to Convert an EJB Application to Spring Boot

utejomurtula

Hello developers! Continuing our series on GitHub Copilot tips, here's another valuable insight to enhance your coding experience: In today's fast-paced development environment, migrating legacy applications to modern frameworks is a common practice. One such migration is converting Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) applications to Spring Boot. This blog will guide you through the few tips on transforming your EJB application into a Spring Boot application using GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered code completion tool that can assist you in writing code more efficiently. Step By Step Approach Understand the Exis...

Jan 15, 2025
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Tips and Tricks for Adopting GitHub Copilot at Scale

David Sanchez

Introduction​ Adopting GitHub Copilot at scale can be a game-changer for many development teams (especially large or distributed teams). This blog post provides best practices, actionable tips, and tricks to ensure a successful adoption of GitHub Copilot to ensure successful adoption at scale, foster engagement, and maximize the return on investment (ROI). 1. Raise Awareness and Streamline License Requests​ One common challenge in organizations is ensuring that developers are aware of the tools and resources available to them. Simply buying the GitHub Copilot licenses is not enough, organizations must acti...

Jan 15, 2025
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Agentic AI Explained: A Philosophical Framework for Understanding AI Agents

David Barkol

Imagine an AI-powered world where assistance goes beyond tasks -- where intelligent agents debate, learn and collaborate with the wisdom of history's greatest minds. What if Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle could step into the digital age, engaging in vibrant discussions and offering their timeless perspectives. In this article, I'll delve into how AI agents can embody these great thinkers -- blending ancient wisdom with modern AI. Agent Personas An agent persona is like a character with its own strengths and style of thinking. By giving agents the personas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we can see ho...