Azure Feeds

GA: Azure Backup now supports Item-Level Recovery for Azure VMs using Premium SSD v2 and Ultra disks (512 byte and 4KB logical sector sizes), so you can recover individual files and folders from those VMs; enable ILR in your backup/restore workflow.

GA: ABFS Vectored Read for Azure Data Lake Storage is now available; if your analytics engine is compatible, use ABFS Vectored Read to combine nearby file-range requests and run reads asynchronously to reduce network round trips for selective reads.

GA (starting 30 Oct 2026): Microsoft Entra ID adds Choose Your Own Telephony (CYOT), allowing organisations to configure a supported third-party telephony provider in Entra ID to handle SMS and voice authentication instead of Microsoft telephony.

GA: Azure Cosmos DB Safe Key Rotation is now generally available, you can view timestamp metadata for each account key to identify which keys were last used before rotating or retiring credentials.

Public preview: Azure introduces the disable VNet peering route capability, a route-table setting that suppresses system-generated peering routes on subnets associated with that route table so you can prevent automatic peering routes and control traffic between peered VNets...

GA: Azure Front Door Premium WAF now supports a service tag match condition for custom rules, so you can match traffic by Azure service tag IP groups (managed and updated by Microsoft); consider replacing fragile IP-based rules with service tags.

GA: Application Gateway now supports keyless TLS termination using certificates stored in Azure Key Vault Managed HSM, with TLS handshake signatures performed inside the HSM and the private key never exported; configure your gateway to use Managed HSM instead of uploading keys.

GA: Advanced platform metrics for Azure Monitor are now generally available, providing finer-grained metrics across resources; enable or configure these metrics in Monitor and update dashboards and alert rules to make use of the higher-resolution signals.

Generally available: Metrics usage insights for Azure Monitor workspace is now GA, start using it to monitor workspace metrics utilisation, identify unused metrics, track usage trends, and investigate changes to reduce unnecessary metrics ingestion and costs.

GA: Azure DNS now supports Traffic Manager linked records, so you can directly associate an Azure DNS record set with a Traffic Manager profile instead of creating a CNAME to the Traffic Manager endpoint; update existing DNS records and automation to use linked records.

Public Preview: Azure Databricks Private Network Gateway is available, letting serverless Databricks compute connect to resources in your VNet and transitively connected networks via a single managed gateway, so evaluate and plan VNet routing and security controls before using...

Generally Available: External key management for Azure Key Vault Managed HSM is now GA in all Azure public regions, enabling organisations with regulatory or sovereignty requirements to retain physical control of key-encryption keys for use with Azure services, so plan...

Preview: Azure Storage Mover now supports copying and synchronising Azure Files file shares across storage accounts, Azure regions, and subscriptions within the same tenant, with scheduled incremental transfers to maintain secondary copies.

Generally Available (GA): Standard service endpoint in the Azure Private Link family is now available; configure it to connect Azure IaaS workloads to Azure PaaS services to address manageability and scale limitations.

Generally Available: Automatic zone balance for Virtual Machine Scale Sets is now GA; it continuously monitors VM scale sets across availability zones and automatically redistributes instances when zonal imbalances occur, so review or enable it to improve zone distribution and...

GA: Azure Cloud HSM now produces hardware-generated audit records for supported HSM management operations; enable and collect hardware audit logs to support security monitoring, compliance reporting, governance, and forensic investigations.

GA: Azure Site Recovery now supports disaster recovery for Azure Arc-enabled Windows VMware virtual machines and on-premises physical servers; register ARC-managed machines with ASR and configure protection policies to add DR while retaining Azure ARC governance and inventory.

For massive-scale Virtual WAN deployments, design with multiple VWAN hubs per region to scale capacity and distribute regional connectivity.

Implement a hub-spoke topology using Azure Virtual WAN as the Microsoft-managed hub; follow the guidance to connect spoke virtual networks, branches, and remote users.

Adopt a hub-spoke VNet topology: connect spoke VNets to a central hub VNet to centralise shared services and route connectivity between spokes via the hub.

Structure your Azure data platform to include disaster recovery by adopting enterprise landing zones and integrating analytics components into your DR planning and deployments.

Follow the ExpressRoute architecture guidance to provision private connectivity between your on-premises network and Azure virtual networks, and use the document to plan circuits, peering, and routing choices for your deployment.

Use the reference-architecture guide to compare on-premises to Azure virtual network connection options and pick the architecture that matches your resiliency, security, and management requirements before you provision.

Map AWS identity services to equivalent Azure identity solutions to plan migrations, ensuring chosen Azure authentication, federation, and policy controls match your requirements.

Measure and manage Kubernetes costs by tracking cluster and workload spend, applying governance and optimisation, and comparing AKS versus Amazon EKS when selecting a platform.

Use this guidance to manage Kubernetes nodes and node pools: it explains AKS node and node pool handling and compares node pool options for Amazon EKS and AKS so you can choose and configure the right pool strategy.

Follow the Azure reference baseline architecture when deploying AKS clusters to align with recommended infrastructure patterns and reduce custom configuration surprises during cluster rollout.

Avoid synchronous I/O that blocks calling threads; refactor to asynchronous I/O patterns to preserve performance and vertical scalability.

Deploy basic web applications on Azure App Service with Azure SQL Database, following proven deployment practices for hosting, scaling, and connectivity.

Treat LiteLLM 1.107.0 as compromised: if you use it, rotate any credentials that might have been exposed, scan hosts for malicious Python startup hooks and remote-loaded code, and implement Microsoft's recommended detections and mitigations.

Follow the 'Code with Cosmos' four-episode series to implement a production-ready AI app with Cosmos DB, covering integration of current operational data, action/transaction handling, session memory, and orchestration between specialised components.

Retirement: SMS and voice MFA retire on 1 Feb 2027, download and run the free offline EffectivePasskey tool to list what passkey types each user can actually register, what admins can sign in with under Conditional Access, and who will be blocked so you can update policies.

If you run the Microsoft Entra provisioning (Cloud Sync) agent through a Squid proxy you may see intermittent agent errors 12015 and 12011 while the cloud configuration remains Healthy, so review your proxy configuration, connectivity to Microsoft endpoints, and agent logs for...

Start running the Azure Cosmos DB Emulator in Docker for local development and CI so you can use the same SDK as production to validate that writes reach storage and subsequent reads return the updated data.

Rollout in progress: Windows OS time-zone updates are being applied to Azure App Service for Windows via accelerated Safe Deployment Practices, so test and monitor any apps that rely on local time or time-zone data and watch the post for the completion update.

Rolling out: Azure Functions are being patched for updated time-zone rules, Node.js and Python runtimes, and the eMudhra/emSign certificate; Windows apps follow App Service Windows patching, Linux apps are patched separately by the Azure Functions team, and Static Web Apps...

Preview: Azure Storage Discovery adds advanced capacity insights,data access, age, tier, composition, and object-size analysis, plus drilldowns to the accounts, containers, and prefixes behind trends; evaluate the preview to access deeper capacity analytics across your storage...

Review the updated SharePoint Embedded guidance on service limits, throttling management, and permission selection, and update your app design, permission model, and throttling/retry logic before moving enterprise apps to production.

Azure App Service for Linux updated its built-in platform images to include IANA time zone database 2026e rules; the rollout is complete on the Latest release channel (22 Oct 2026), so move apps to Latest to get the TZ updates now, Standard will get them via SDP.

Rollout of Windows OS certificate updates for the eMudhra/emSign CA certificate security incident on Azure App Service for Windows has started and is currently in progress; monitor Azure Service Health and this post for completion and any required action.

Patched built-in Linux images addressing the eMudhra/emSign CA certificate security incident have been rolled out to the Latest Platform Release channel for Azure App Service on Linux; move your app to Latest to get the fixes now, the Standard channel will receive them through...

Rollout of updated built-in Node.js runtimes on Azure App Service for Windows has started; check your apps and app settings for runtime compatibility, monitor logs and telemetry for regressions, and follow the App Service Blog for the completion update.

Updated built-in Node.js and Python images with emergency security fixes have been deployed to the Latest Platform Release channel for Azure App Service on Linux; move your apps to Latest to apply the fixes immediately, the Standard channel will get them via Safe Deployment...

User reports Hotmail account recovery failing after moving country (recovery form marked insufficient and recovery email inaccessible); action: contact Microsoft Account support to request a manual recovery review to regain access to documents.

Rotate and audit application credentials and service principals for ConnectWise and other third-party integrations, review OAuth app consents, enforce conditional access and MFA for app access, and increase monitoring of sign-in and app-consent activity for signs of ARTEX...

Microsoft and Snowflake have committed to Apache Ossie (incubating), a vendor-neutral standard for exchanging semantic metadata across analytics, AI, and BI; teams should track Ossie for upcoming semantic interoperability between Fabric, Microsoft Databases, and Snowflake.

Use the Intune at Microsoft Ignite 2026 guide to find sessions and labs, meet the product teams, and start planning organisational questions and actions for managing and protecting endpoints across Windows, macOS, and mobile.

Copilot Autofix for GitHub Advanced Security in Azure DevOps now runs on an agentic foundation and adds support for fixing dependency vulnerabilities and ingesting code-scanning alerts from third-party tools; enable or configure Agentic Autofix in your pipelines to get...

GA: Safe Key Rotation in Azure Cosmos DB is now generally available; it surfaces per-account-key last-used timestamps so you can identify unused keys, update rotation schedules, and plan Entra ID migrations to avoid service outages.

The PHP team published two critical vulnerabilities (CVSS v4.0 9.2); if you run PHP apps on Azure App Service on Linux, apply the PHP security updates or follow Microsoft App Service guidance immediately and verify any custom images or extensions for the vulnerable PHP versions.

Microsoft says it will advance digital sovereignty by offering greater control and choice to government, critical infrastructure, and regulated industries; organisations should review their digital sovereignty posture, data residency, access controls, and procurement or...

Azure DevOps Plugin is now available in Microsoft Copilot (Chat, Cowork, and Code), so you can access projects, work items, pull requests, test plans, and pipelines from Copilot without switching to the Azure DevOps UI.

Work IQ's new Retrieve tool provides a single retrieval layer across work sources, so developers can ground agents with richer organisational context without building separate search systems,evaluate integrating Retrieve into your agents and MCP tool workflows.

Preview: Fabric Data Warehouse now lets you call Fabric User Data Functions (Python) directly from T-SQL, so you can create T-SQL external functions to send email or Teams messages, fetch parameters and secrets from Fabric variable libraries or Azure Key Vault, and access...

Classify AI workloads by data-residency, compliance, latency, and control needs, and organise deployments across edge, on-premises, and cloud so each workload runs where required sovereign controls and consistency can be applied.

Update your .NET MAUI app for Xcode 27's scene lifecycle changes: run the provided agent skill to prepare the project and follow the post's manual migration steps before building with Xcode 27.

Configure the GitHub Copilot SDK in C# to retain the agent runtime while routing model requests to your own Microsoft Foundry or Azure OpenAI deployment, using the provided C# setup to implement bring-your-own-model.

Microsoft added new capabilities in Microsoft 365 E7 and Project Perception to contain risks from autonomous agents, so review your Microsoft 365 E7 entitlements, plan evaluation of Project Perception where available, and update detection, access and response controls to cover...

If your Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync agent shows Connected but no users are syncing, treat Connected as agent-level health only and immediately check your Cloud Sync provisioning policy configuration, scoping, and the on-prem service account permissions.

GA: Microsoft Foundry's browser automation tool is now generally available; provision Foundry browser automation build agents to automate tasks on public and private websites using managed browsers, native toolbox integration, Live View, and human control, and update affected...

Establish risk controls for open-weight models: verify provenance and licences, run security and performance validation, define acceptable uses and rollback plans, and add continuous monitoring before production deployment.

Use the Microsoft and NVIDIA whitepaper's shared taxonomy, evaluation methods, and controls to assess and mitigate risks of open-weight models before production deployment, and update your model governance and risk-assessment artefacts to reference its guidance.

When configuring Microsoft Entra B2B Direct Connect between separate Microsoft 365 tenants, keep users as native accounts in their home tenants and follow the blog's configuration guidance to enable cross-tenant Direct Connect and file sharing while preserving home-tenant...

A real-tenant test showed two Entra app registrations obtained v2.0 client credentials tokens (RS256) with each agent binding its own signing key inside the token lifetime (record format idp-bind-v0), enabling offline verification of Entra-issued agent identities by a third...

Adopt the Planner-Executor loop pattern for agentic systems on Azure: implement a planner to decompose goals and an executor to call tools, and design for iterative result evaluation and error handling as described in the guidance.

September 2026: Microsoft Foundry added new models plus Routines, Tool Search, Model Router, and Insights; review the developer changelog, test these features against your Foundry workflows, and update any model routing or tool integration configurations.

GA: Automatic Zone Balance for Virtual Machine Scale Sets is now generally available; enable it on zonal scale sets so Azure continuously redistributes VM instances across availability zones to reduce single-zone impact and maintain resiliency.

Generally Available (GA): Power BI now lets you create reports with custom visuals using Skills for Fabric; the October 2026 update also includes a Gantt chart (Preview) and enhancements to Copilot, AI, and semantic models you should review.

Read the Power BI September 2026 feature summary for new Copilot and AI experiences, reporting, modeling, connectivity, developer, and mobile updates, and act on the listed deprecations by identifying impacted reports and scheduling remediation.

GA: Databricks ADBC connector for Power BI and Microsoft Fabric is generally available; existing ODBC-based connections continue to work, migration is opt-in per connection, workspace, or tenant, and opting in moves you to the ADBC driver with memory-safety and...

dotnetup is a new toolchain manager for macOS and Linux that installs, manages, and updates user-local .NET SDKs and runtimes, so developers can maintain per-user SDK/runtime versions without touching system-wide packages.

Update your platform to support cloud-native AI workloads by adopting containerised, orchestrated, and scalable infrastructure and operational practices to build, run, and optimise models and agents at scale across cloud and edge.

When building agentic systems on Azure, apply the Planner-Executor loop rather than a simple LLM-to-API wiring: separate planning from execution, orchestrate tool calls, and add result evaluation and recovery logic.

Azure Cosmos DB vNext Emulator has been introduced: use the new emulator to run Cosmos DB locally for agentic development and longer coding-agent sessions, and evaluate it as an alternative to the legacy emulator for local testing.

If you run SQL Server on Windows in affected British Columbia, Alberta, or Manitoba locations, apply Microsoft's interim guidance for the new Windows time zones and temporary workarounds before 1 Nov 2026, because those areas will not set clocks back and will remain at...

General availability (GA): Azure MCP Server 3.0 is now stable and adds AI agent tools for Terraform, backup, recovery, and troubleshooting, plus stronger default security settings, so plan to upgrade or deploy 3.0 to access these changes.

Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms; update your vendor evaluations and procurement artefacts to include Azure, Azure Arc, and Hyper-V as evaluated options and schedule proofs-of-concept if you rely on other...

Consume Azure Content Understanding's grounding, field-level confidence, and calibration outputs in your document-processing pipelines to route low-confidence fields for human review, set confidence thresholds to prioritise automation, and reduce manual verification effort.

If your Microsoft Entra ID tenant is global but includes users physically located in mainland China, evaluate Passkey (Microsoft Authenticator) and FIDO2 security key compatibility and behaviour for those users before replacing SMS/voice with phishing-resistant authentication.

Microsoft disrupted a Chinese-language phishing infrastructure ecosystem (operators tracked as Storm-2990 and a marketplace tracked as Storm-3119); security teams should review phishing protections, update detection rules, and monitor for reconstitution or redirected campaigns.

October patches for Azure DevOps Server were released: update your self-hosted Azure DevOps Server instances to the latest patched versions listed on the download page, and consult the Azure DevOps Blog post for which versions were patched and installation instructions.

Preview: .NET 11 Release Candidate 2 is available, install the RC2 SDK in your dev and staging environments and test your apps, libraries, MSBuild/NuGet workflows, F#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, and Windows Forms projects before the final release.

Azure Container Registry now emits two new metrics, Transactions and Data Transfer, with per-registry and per-geo-replica breakdowns by operation and serving region; update your Grafana dashboards and alerts to consume these metrics for activity and egress visibility.

GitHub can post repository notifications into Teams channels, group chats, or private chats and, when you reply and @mention GitHub, Copilot will act on the linked issue or pull request to reproduce bugs, run tests, implement fixes, and prepare pull requests; adjust your team...

Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric centralises security signals across subscriptions, regions, clouds, and database platforms so security and database teams can assess estate-level posture and prioritise remediation; connect your database estate to Database Hub and integrate its...

CVE-2026-111497 affects Brotli decoder versions 1.0.3-1.2.0 and can be exploited via crafted Brotli-compressed requests; mitigate by enabling Azure Web Application Firewall protections for affected endpoints, blocking or inspecting requests with Content-Encoding: br, and...

GA: Azure OpenAI Decisions API is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry; start using Decisions for routing, model selection, and workflow-branch decisions inside Foundry workflows instead of full generative calls, and update agent and workflow designs to call the...

Adopt a repeatable, product-engineering operating model (inventory, governance, operations, monitoring) to move Copilot, agents, and AI apps from pilots into company-wide programmes; apply the runbook patterns in the article to reduce fragmented pilots and improve governance.

Before your next VM refresh, reassess PaaS alternatives and, if you stay on VMs, verify MANA behaviour for your VM series (it can change the network adapter after maintenance), confirm Accelerated Networking supported OS and driver versions, and plan around VM lifecycle stages.

The October 23 Title Plan has technical issues; continue using the October 9 Title Plan for the URL Creation Tool tab and subscribe to weekly updates at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan for the latest ILT title plan.

The BlockNtlmv1SSO setting took effect with the October 2026 update and disables NTLMv1-based SSO in MS-CHAPv2 flows used by VPN, Wi-Fi, NPS, and RADIUS; verify affected devices and authentication configurations and migrate clients and services to modern authentication to avoid...

SQL Server 2025 RTM Cumulative Update 10 is available for download (no registration required); schedule, test, and apply CU10 per your servicing policy and review the CU10 KB for details.

Microsoft Access Version 2610 (Build 16.0.20527.20088) fixes Ctrl+mouse wheel zoom for datasheet subforms and corrects context menu positioning on zoomed forms, while the intermittent "There isn't enough memory or disk space" error remains and is scheduled for the next Version...

Partner Digital Journey Agentic Skilling Experience is now live (GA): partners can create AI-personalised skilling paths based on role, time commitment, and stated goals to produce tailored learning recommendations.

Alerts for Azure SQL Database in Database Hub are now in public preview: you can create alert rules from built-in templates or turn Performance charts into alerts so Database Hub notifies you when a database needs attention.

AI Skills Navigator's October 2026 update makes learning more interactive, adds features to help prepare for credentials, and surfaces next-step recommendations in the flow of work, so learning teams should review the changes and adjust their skilling paths accordingly.

Foundry Managed Fine-Tuning added four open-source models (Muse-Glimmer-30B, qwen3.8-27b, qwen3.6-35b-a3b, gpt-oss-120b) with supervised fine-tuning support, added MAI-Code-1.1-Flash to Foundry resources, and introduced Multi-LoRA Managed Compute in public preview so compatible...

An entomology use case shows the Microsoft Discovery app can speed multidisciplinary research by combining literature, experimental protocols, domain tools, and observational data, so teams building biological monitoring agents should evaluate Discovery for integrating those...

Private Network Gateway (PNG) for Azure Databricks serverless is in public preview: use a single managed connection into your Azure Virtual Network to simplify private connectivity and control which network resources serverless workloads can access.

Microsoft Marketplace now offers intelligent discovery and App Advisor so customers can describe a business problem in natural language to get contextual recommendations, meaning publishers should verify how their solutions appear in the new discovery flow.

Co-op Translator's production experience shows you need processes and automated review signals to identify which translated documents require human review after source updates, rather than re-checking every translation.

Microsoft Defender now includes a Threat Intelligence experience that consolidates Microsoft threat intelligence, third-party feeds, and your team's insights to help you prioritise which threats to investigate; review and enable it in your Defender tenant.

SharePoint now supports HTML pages in the Site Pages library: you can create pages with Copilot or upload existing HTML files and use the same edit, publish, and sharing flows as modern pages, so update your content workflows and governance accordingly.

Microsoft Foundry includes a Next Best Action workbench demo built with Microsoft-Decision-1 and GPT-4o that compares rules and recommendations for sales workflows; use the demo as a reference pattern when building NBA systems.

Microsoft 365 Insights Agent now captures thumbs-up/thumbs-down and verbatim comments from users of your agents so you can review feedback to guide improvements, tests, and prioritised changes to agent behaviour.

Azure Local with disconnected operations (Azure Local 2609) adds scheduled control-plane backups, so configure scheduled backups to improve recoverability for sovereign and disconnected environments.

Follow Microsoft's guidance to design access policies for hybrid enterprises using resource-specific rules and adaptive, risk-based conditions to control who and what can access resources as risk changes.

For production RAG systems, implement processes to detect document uploads, updates, and deletions and re-ingest or update vector indexes and caches so assistant answers do not remain stale after content changes.

If you cannot immediately upgrade PHP for CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, deploy the provided Azure WAF custom rules to reduce exposure to known PHP2Shell exploit request patterns while you plan upgrades.

Use the open-source Azure Service Health to Slack reference implementation to forward Service Health alerts for your services and regions into Slack; review the repo's design, threat model, and cost guidance before deployment.

Microsoft Marketplace published 230 new offers (Sept 11-15, 2026), including cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents; review the Marketplace for trials or purchase options relevant to your environment.

GA: Modern Query Editor for Azure SQL Database is now generally available in the Azure portal, adding Object Explorer, a multi-tab query workspace, and interactive query results so you can run and inspect queries from the portal without desktop tools.

Re-evaluate hub-and-spoke: the article recommends moving towards routable and non-advertised network designs as your Azure estate expands across regions, landing zones, prod/non-prod, DR, and existing datacentres, and to plan routing and CIDR delegation changes accordingly.

Microsoft will be a sponsor at PASS Data Community Summit 2026 with sessions and product deep-dives across the Azure Data portfolio (SQL, PostgreSQL, Fabric); plan to attend sessions or meet product engineers if you need guidance on migrations or operations.

Critical PHP RCE (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619): upgrade to a patched PHP release immediately to fully remediate, and apply Azure Web Application Firewall mitigations as a temporary protection.

Beginning with the Windows client/server release in 2027, applicable WHCP driver signing submissions must include a valid Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), so partners need to update signing pipelines to produce and attach SBOMs.

Enable ABFS Vectored Read for Azure Data Lake Storage when your analytics engine and Parquet reader support it to combine noncontiguous byte-range reads, reduce request overhead, and improve selective-column query performance.

Microsoft published a Teams performance and reliability update (improvements in chat switching, reduced hangs, and faster people search); review the release notes and plan client updates, telemetry checks, and support guidance for users.

Preview: Enhanced Feature Flags in Azure App Configuration are available in public preview; test the new feature-flag representation and rollout controls, and plan any required schema or client integration changes.

Microsoft announced Copilot Code, an AI coding experience that pairs code generation with environment setup, hosting, and app lifecycle capabilities; review the announcement and plan to evaluate it for rapid prototyping and small application delivery.

Azure Linux 4.0 is introduced as the next evolution of CBL-Mariner for cloud-scale workloads and container hosts; assess image compatibility, security updates, and any migration work for container clusters that depend on CBL-Mariner.

Wolters Kluwer scaled tax and accounting software using PostgreSQL on Azure; read the case study for practical patterns on scaling, operational practices, and architecture choices to inform your PostgreSQL deployments.

Register for the free SWOOP Analytics Festival 2026 | Viva Engage Edition on 11 November 2026 to hear practical lessons from organisations using Viva Engage and apply relevant experiments and lessons in your internal communications programme.

Use pghacker-mcp.dev to give AI agents and tooling direct access to the pgsql-hackers mailing-list archive so they can reason about PostgreSQL's historical design discussions and code decisions.

When you need to ground AI experiences in SharePoint without building a vector database, use the Microsoft 365 Copilot Retrieval API for SharePoint Embedded and the SharePoint Embedded Model Context Protocol server to control grounding, prompts, and model selection.

Attend or submit questions for the live webinar 'How AI-powered attacks happen' on Tuesday, 27 October to learn real attack scenarios and the security controls that stop them.

Azure Content Understanding GA API is now the recommended production baseline for structured understanding of documents, images, audio, and video; use preview APIs only for controlled evaluation and enable confidence and grounding to route uncertain results for review.

When using open-weight models in Microsoft Foundry, evaluate licensing, data-processing location, quotas, support posture, and regional availability, prefer Serverless API when a supported Foundry Model fits, and run Marketplace and Product Terms checks before using partner or...

When choosing Microsoft Foundry, Azure Databricks, or Microsoft Fabric, map which platform should own each part of your solution (data engineering, ML, agents, operational ownership) instead of relying on a long feature checklist.

Stop comparing feature checklists: decide which platform will own each part of your data and AI solution (data engineering, ML, AI agents, orchestration), document those ownership boundaries, and choose Microsoft Foundry, Azure Databricks, or Microsoft Fabric based on those...

Preview: Azure Monitor introduces private IP endpoint compression for data collection endpoints on Azure Monitor Private Link Scope (AMPLS); test this preview to reduce private IP address consumption for large-scale private monitoring and plan your address allocation and...

When migrating Ansys CFX to Azure, benchmark multiple AMD EPYC-based HPC VMs for time-to-complete and total cost per simulation, because the largest VM or lowest hourly price does not necessarily give the lowest cost-per-simulation.

New Tech Community guide: use GPU memory profiling on AKS to trace which functions in your AI workloads cause GPU memory pressure so you can fix OOMs or avoid overprovisioning.

Retirement: Microsoft Foundry workflows (visual designer and running workflows in the Foundry portal) will be retired on 1 December 2026; migrate Foundry agents and workflows to Azure Logic Apps before that date.

New: Education for Cowork, a Microsoft plugin for Microsoft Copilot Cowork that adds 10 education-focused skills for administrative and academic workflows, is rolling out worldwide, enable it in Copilot Cowork to add those capabilities.

New guide: the Windows release information toolbox maps where to check release status, monthly update contents, and servicing dates so you know which resource to consult for updates, health, or diagnostics.

New certification: GitHub Certified: Agentic AI Business Professional validates skills in using GitHub and GitHub Copilot to design agentic workflows and apply human oversight to multistep automation.

Research: a technical paper presents agentic RAG approaches for turning enterprise documents into AI knowledge; it is published as educational, research-only guidance, not production-ready development instructions.

New: Azure Copilot for Azure Local brings AI-driven, natural-language troubleshooting and operational assistance to Azure Local clusters to help operators investigate connectivity, health, and diagnostics.

GA: Azure Container Registry now emits Data Transfer and Transactions metrics to Azure Monitor (with dimensions for operation, response, and region), use them to inspect outbound data transfer, API traffic, and investigate throttled or failed requests.

Public preview: Unified Data Management for Microsoft Sentinel is in public preview in the new Data & connectors experience in the Defender portal, letting you monitor connectors, tables, and ingestion health from a single place,start evaluating it for ingestion and cost...

Pricing change: Microsoft Defender for Cloud is introducing the Defender Workload Unit (DWU), a single billing unit and unit price for workload-specific usage, update cost estimates and tracking to use DWU.

OneDrive now includes Copilot capabilities, simplified sharing, and AI photo features; review and update admin controls, sharing policies, and Copilot access settings to control who and what data can be accessed.

Microsoft Defender's expanded cross-tenant delegated administration is generally available: configure Entra Tenant Governance relationships to delegate security tasks across tenants instead of granting broad access or managing permissions per analyst.

Partners should package unified, governed foundations across Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL, and the broader Microsoft data and AI platform to move customers from AI experimentation to enterprise-scale deployments.

Microsoft announced Direct Guest Join, which will allow Teams Rooms to join Zoom Meetings and Zoom Rooms to join Teams meetings, so plan for cross-platform room use and confirm your room deployment strategy.

General availability: Advanced platform metrics in Azure Monitor are GA, beginning with Azure Storage, providing finer-grained telemetry,update metric collection, dashboards, and alerts to consume the new signals.

Azure SRE Agent October update adds new guidance, examples, and integrations (including Splunk) with practical security and architecture guidance,review the updated docs and examples to adjust SRE Agent configurations and tool integrations.

Microsoft Defender now includes Multi-Agent Security Defense with pre-built playbooks, MAI Cyber Flash to reduce token costs, and session management from the Defender portal or the MCP plug-in,test the playbooks and enforce approval gates before running agents.

Microsoft announced new and expanded capabilities for Microsoft Sovereign Public Cloud at the October Frontier Tour; platform and security engineers should review the updated controls and architecture guidance and adjust landing zones and operator-access configurations.

General availability: Product Ingestion APIs for SaaS and virtual machine Marketplace offers are now GA and Marketplace Ingestion MCP reached 100% product coverage, so integrate these APIs into your publishing pipelines to automate offer ingestion.

On Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, monitor and remove or repair unused or stalled replication slots because they can retain WAL files and cause unexpected storage growth (check replica lag, broken replicas, deleted logical subscribers, and read-only primaries).

Use Foundry Local for Android to build an on-device voice companion that transcribes queries, performs local record lookups, and returns spoken answers without sending conversations to cloud models.

Microsoft EDU October 2026 update adds Teach in Microsoft Copilot features, Learning Zone and Teams for Education updates, Study & Learn agent, Copilot Notebooks and OneNote changes, and a no-cost Copilot Chat with data protection,review these for education deployments.

Microsoft Marketplace published 228 new offers (8-10 Sept 2026), including AI Appliance Repair CRM and AI Claims Assistant for Insurers; review the Marketplace to trial or acquire these new solutions.

GA: Cross-tenant delegated administration in Microsoft Defender is now generally available; configure Entra Tenant Governance relationships to delegate security tasks across tenants without granting broad access.

Foundry Local and Azure Local provide options to run AI closer to data or in limited-connectivity environments for sovereign and regulated workloads; evaluate these where you need greater operational control and data residency.

Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud, built on Azure Local, extends cloud capabilities into customer-controlled infrastructure; take the Microsoft Sovereign Cloud assessment to identify which sovereign cloud solution fits your organisation.

GA at Microsoft Ignite: GitHub Enterprise Local will deliver the GitHub Enterprise Server experience in your own environments, with guided Azure deployment to keep source code and development workflows local for regulated, sovereign, or disconnected scenarios.

Plan Java upgrades on Azure ahead of Microsoft's 2027 support milestones: migrate from Java 8 (supported via Eclipse Temurin builds) to supported Microsoft Build of OpenJDK versions 11, 17, 21, or 25 where applicable.

Users can now provision their own Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PCs, business continuity settings are consolidated, and Admin insights appear on the Cloud PC Overview page,review tenant policies and update your provisioning and continuity processes.

General Availability: Large OS Disk Encryption (LOSDE) is now GA for Azure Confidential VM migrations, enabling confidential encryption of operating system disks larger than 127 GB so you can migrate larger, sensitive workloads while retaining Confidential VM protections.

Use Azure Confidential Computing solutions with NVIDIA and Protopia to protect sensitive AI workloads (for example claims review or clinical-note analysis), keeping data protected during model execution and transit.

GA: Microsoft Intune now allows you to require users on Android Enterprise managed devices to authenticate with a managed Google Account (Google Workspace identity); ensure your Managed Google Play enterprise is upgraded to a managed Google domain enterprise, then enable the...

Region expansion: Microsoft announced the Saudi Arabia East Azure region, expected to become available in November 2026; review Microsoft Entra ID data residency, tenant configuration, and compliance mapping for customers who will require local Saudi data storage.

Use the new troubleshooting playbook and checklist for Auto-labelling in SharePoint and OneDrive to diagnose and fix missing prerequisites, simulation behaviour, and label-precedence issues when service-side auto-labelling does not apply, noting the tenant ceiling is now up to...

General Availability: Metrics usage insights for Azure Monitor workspace is now GA, providing end-to-end visibility into metrics usage so you can analyse what drives metric volume over time and identify optimisation opportunities.

Use Web IQ to bring external web evidence into your AI agents for five practical workflows that need fresh outside information, including changing regulations, emerging market trends, supplier disruptions, and competitive developments.

Azure Container Registry now emits a customer-facing Data Transfer metric in Azure Monitor that breaks egress down by API name (GetManifest, GetBlob), GeoReplication, and ImportSource, so enable or query these metrics to see which operations cause outbound data and to inform...

Now available in Microsoft Foundry: Meta Muse Spark Open, NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, and Reflection Beam, evaluate these new open-weight models for enterprise coding and agentic workloads; Muse Spark Open uses a Mixture of Experts and supports very long context in the...

Use a JMS bridge to connect on-prem JMS brokers (for example IBM MQ) to Azure Service Bus Premium so existing Java applications can keep using their current broker while messages are forwarded into Service Bus, using each provider's client library and connection factory.

Treat governance for AI agents as a permission model rather than a brake: define policies and processes that allow approved agent use under controlled conditions so the business can adopt agents without stalling.

PowerPoint's Copilot now includes a 'create interactive slide' skill that generates interactive slides from a prompt or existing content, letting you convert dashboards, processes, or data into slides your audience can explore.

GA: The Change Optics Report is now generally available in Exchange Online, use it to preview and identify messages that will be impacted by upcoming service changes so you can adjust mail flow before those changes arrive.

Treat on-premises RAG as a placement decision: map trust boundaries and classify controls into code-implemented, present-but-limited, and non-optional blockers, and remediate credentials on disk, LAN traffic, overprivileged users, overloaded accelerators, verbose errors, and...

Adopt decision-ghc-router to route GitHub Copilot CLI and VS Code requests to different models by task (for example, small models for README edits and larger models for complex debugging) to cut latency and cost and avoid over/under-powering turns.

Generate the ARM infrastructure template, parameter file, and both Azure DevOps pipeline YAMLs with the Azure Logic Apps (Standard) Visual Studio Code extension to deploy Logic Apps Hybrid to an Arc-enabled Kubernetes connected environment instead of hand-writing templates and...

Integrate Microsoft Web IQ web-grounding APIs into LLMs and AI agents to provide current, verifiable web information for answers that may trigger workflows or actions, improving grounding quality, speed, and efficiency.

When a stored procedure is slower on one server, first determine whether it is doing more work or just taking longer to do comparable work by collecting execution evidence such as execution plans and runtime statistics before changing data or indexes.

If your AI application needs facts beyond model training data, integrate Web IQ's Web Search and Grounding APIs to fetch web evidence to ground model outputs when planning, summarising, or writing code.

Use the Tech Community troubleshooting FAQ when a guarded fabric fails to deploy, a host fails attestation, or a shielded VM cannot be provisioned, started, migrated, serviced, or recovered; do not use TPM clearing, a new or local key protector, disabled Secure Boot or Code...

Security update SQL Server 2025 RTM CU9 is now available (cumulative) and addresses CVE-2026-32176 (Denial of Service); download and apply the CU9 package from the Microsoft Download Center or Update Catalog.

Security update SQL Server 2025 RTM GDR is now available (cumulative) and addresses CVE-2026-32176 (Denial of Service); download and apply the GDR package from the Microsoft Download Center or Update Catalog.

Security update SQL Server 2022 RTM CU27 is now available (cumulative) and addresses CVE-2026-32176 (Denial of Service); download and apply CU27 from the Microsoft Download Center or Update Catalog.

Security update SQL Server 2022 RTM GDR is now available (cumulative) and addresses CVE-2026-32176 (Denial of Service); download and apply the GDR package from the Microsoft Download Center or Update Catalog.

Security update SQL Server 2019 RTM CU32 is now available (cumulative) and addresses CVE-2026-32176 (Denial of Service); download and apply CU32 from the Microsoft Download Center or Update Catalog.

Security update SQL Server 2019 RTM GDR is now available (cumulative) and addresses CVE-2026-32176 (Denial of Service); download and apply the GDR package from the Microsoft Download Center or Update Catalog.

Security update SQL Server 2017 RTM CU31 is now available (cumulative) and addresses CVE-2026-32176 (Denial of Service); download and apply CU31 from the Microsoft Download Center or Update Catalog.

Security update SQL Server 2017 RTM GDR is now available (cumulative) and addresses CVE-2026-32176 (Denial of Service); download and apply the GDR package from the Microsoft Download Center or Update Catalog.

If your servers received the October 13, 2026 Windows updates, check Exchange servers for instability: OWA MapiExceptionMdbOffline with event ID 1006, growing mail queues, and DAG members failing to reach quorum, and investigate any affected servers immediately.

Microsoft is running live webinars, AMA sessions, and an on-demand video repository for Microsoft Entra; sign up or use the on-demand content to refresh your identity configurations, Zero Trust controls, and hybrid security practices.

Microsoft 365 Copilot now supports Brand Kits that surface approved logos, fonts, and brand guidance inside the content creation experience; brand managers and IT should prepare approved assets and configure controls in Copilot.

Microsoft published guidance to build a tenant-wide Microsoft Foundry model operations dashboard that consolidates deployments, usage, cost, and quota or capacity risk across subscriptions and regions; platform, engineering, governance, and finance teams should implement this...

The Instructor-Led Training Title Plan moved to a weekly publishing cadence; access the latest title plan at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan and update your courseware accordingly.

The October Microsoft Global Community Initiative update highlights CommunityDays.org's new calendar view and other community resources; if you run meetups, user groups, or Community Days, review and sync your event listings.

Join the SQL Modernization Day livestream on Oct 20 (9:00 AM-1:00 PM PT) to learn the Azure SQL migration paths, how to build AI apps after landing in Azure, and the new SQL modernization tools; register to attend the half-day event.

Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Certified: Supply Chain Management AI Consultant Associate certification and announced Exam AB-330 is now in beta, so consultants should consider enrolling in the beta to validate AI-enabled supply chain skills.

Sysinternals updates available: Process Explorer v17.2 adds process efficiency mode, persistent activity history, live kernel memory dumps, a process memory map explorer, a Devices page, and NPU monitoring; ZoomIt v12.3 adds dictation captions; BgInfo v4.34 and other utilities...

The article argues for shifting from application-first UX to intent-first interfaces; evaluate your workflows and data surfaces to expose intent-driven interactions that reduce context switching for users.

When AI assistants are connected to Azure subscriptions with permissions to restart workloads, change network rules, or read Key Vault secrets, treat them as privileged principals: apply threat modelling, restrict permissions, and add audit controls.

Foundry interactive training on lower-cost gpt-oss models delivered up to an 85% F1 gain for information extraction through task-specific fine-tuning; consider using Foundry to fine-tune gpt-oss-20b or gpt-oss-120b to improve field coverage and parseability.

229 new offers went live in Microsoft Marketplace (4-7 Sep 2026); review the Marketplace for new SaaS, AI apps, and Teams-integrated solutions such as Accenture NewsPage and Assurance Map, and update procurement, approval, and vendor lists accordingly.

Include capable AI PCs in your enterprise AI and device planning: decide which parts of AI experiences run on endpoints versus cloud, update refresh-cycle decisions, and adjust deployment, security and app architecture to account for distributed execution.

When you change compute for Azure SQL Database, instrument monitoring of the scaling operation and track its duration and progress, because identical-looking scale requests can take very different amounts of time and impact availability.

When investigating slow queries, enable Query Store and use SSMS Copilot to correlate execution-plan changes as table size grows, so you can identify plan regressions and choose the next remediation step faster.

If your application shows high latency but Azure SQL CPU, Data IO, and worker utilisation look healthy, change your diagnosis to measure where elapsed time is spent (wait types, IO waits, locks, network) and run the appropriate diagnostics rather than focusing on CPU.

MSSQL VS Code extension now ships monthly, Microsoft SQL drivers have been updated for SQL Server 2025, GitHub Copilot can understand your schema, and new Microsoft SQL skills are in public preview to let coding agents assess and migrate SQL Server to Azure SQL,test these in...

Prototype guidance: restrict model authority by implementing fixed dispatch and orchestration server-side (Rust Rocket), let local models only classify or propose typed plans, and validate every plan server-side to reduce attack surface, make latency predictable, and simplify...

Follow the corrected online copy sequence and included Azure CLI snippets in this Cosmos DB migration walkthrough, and pick one of three migration patterns (simplest move, smallest application outage, or durable multi-region) while planning migration duration separately from...

Retirement: Microsoft Intune will end support for CNAME-based EnterpriseEnrollment auto-discovery in Windows MDM-only enrollment on 15 January 2027, so remove CNAME dependencies and prepare to supply or configure the Microsoft enrollment server URL or an alternative discovery...

GA: Muse Spark Open, an open-weight coding-optimised model from Meta trained for agentic coding workflows, is now available in Microsoft Foundry Models via the Hugging Face collection,consider it for coding agents that need reliable tool calling and deeper codebase understanding.

Register for the Microsoft 365 Champion community call on 27 October 2026 (Teams webinar); registration sends the join link by email and sessions run 08:05-09:00 PT and 17:05-18:00 PT, so sign up if you want to attend either slot.

Surface Laptop Ultra is positioned for local AI workloads and Microsoft recommends using Designed for Surface accessories to extend the workspace, so if you deploy these devices review accessory compatibility and plan local model workload and thermal behaviour accordingly.

Rolling change: Windows 11 will receive an updated Photos experience (Insiders first, broad rollout later this year); admins should review how current device management policies apply and test the new Photos behaviour on managed devices.

Shift+Enter Summit is a developer conference named after the Shift+Enter shortcut with a focus on small productivity moves; consult the summit materials if you plan to attend, present, or run related sessions.

Microsoft partners should upskill sales, technical, and delivery teams to connect Copilot, agents, and intelligent applications to customers' data, cloud infrastructure, and governance so you can design, position, and operate AI at scale.

New GitHub Certified: Agentic AI Business Professional certification is available, so business professionals who design or run agentic workflows with GitHub and GitHub Copilot should consider taking the credential to validate those skills.

Microsoft updated the SaaS Accelerator and added Marketplace-focused agent instructions as reference resources, so engineering teams building Marketplace integrations should review and adapt the accelerator and agent instructions rather than rebuilding subscription and billing...

Microsoft Certified: Agentic DevOps Engineer Expert (Exam AZ-401) is now in beta, so DevOps engineers should evaluate the beta exam to validate skills in designing and running AI-assisted CI/CD, delivery, and monitoring across Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Caravana Cloud is an event series across Brazil organised with Microsoft MVPs to bring cloud knowledge and local connections to communities, so community organisers and local teams should consider similar in-person events or partnerships to grow local cloud skills.

Microsoft Copilot for legal is now generally available with 20+ purpose-built legal skills and partner-built plugins, so legal teams should pilot the offering and validate plugin behaviour, provenance, and human-review controls before relying on outputs in practice.

FlashGrid Cluster for running Oracle RAC across Azure availability zones is available in the Microsoft Marketplace, so architects deploying mission-critical Oracle on Azure VMs can deploy FlashGrid from Marketplace to span AZs for higher availability.

Microsoft Olive plus ONNX lets you bring semantic-level models into application logic to produce decisions (next action) rather than chat replies, so developers building decision workflows should evaluate Olive+ONNX for deterministic decision APIs integrated into their apps.

Apply traffic-engineering wayfinding to your Azure conference app: the post presents a digital-passport architecture and UX patterns for routing attendees, sponsor interactions, and stamp flows you can replicate in event apps.

Part 2 provides recommendations to scale Azure SRE Agent enterprise-wide: decide when to share an agent, when teams need their own, how agents should collaborate, and which deployment and governance topologies reduce complexity.

Part 1 gives a step-by-step guide to deploy your first Azure SRE Agent: pick initial use cases, complete the initial setup, and make early decisions about agent sharing so you can reduce operational toil and improve incident response.

Preview: Copilot introduces a team knowledge base curated by Copilot and agents (Frontier Preview) to centralise team context for agents, evaluate the preview to see if it reduces fragmented or outdated information in your team workflows.

Retirement: Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 ended on 13 October 2026, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates, so plan migration or compensating controls for affected servers.

EQ Bank's case study describes an enterprise framework that links AI learning, experimentation, oversight, and governance so organisations can scale AI experimentation while retaining security, risk, and regulatory controls.

Microsoft Foundry update: GPT-chat-latest upgrades to GPT-6-level intelligence for stronger reasoning across coding, search, multilingual interactions, personalisation, and task creation, and adds GenUI support for visual, interactive answers plus an interleaved response...

Review the October 'Microsoft Security for partners' update: it lists Microsoft Sentinel and Defender changes, new Cloud Solution Provider incentives, skilling and customer success resources, so review CSP incentive changes and training for your security practice.

GA: Cross-tenant customer-managed keys (CMK) are now Generally Available for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server; Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric and Azure Backup for PostgreSQL Flexible Server (v2) are in public preview, so plan CMK adoption and test the preview...

mssql-python 1.16.0 released: adds Python 3.15 support, prebuilt wheels for x64 and ARM64 on Windows, Linux and macOS, an official Conda package on the Microsoft channel, and faster fetches; pip install --upgrade mssql-python to update.

Azure SRE Agent adds a new canvas beside Copilot chat that surfaces the agent's findings and actions so you can investigate incidents alongside your code and tools, try the canvas to validate diagnoses within your developer workflow.

If you manage developer Linux desktops, follow Microsoft's guidance on securing those endpoints with Microsoft Defender to reduce risk to source code, CI/CD pipelines and internal platforms.

Time zone change: Alberta will remain on Permanent DST (UTC-6); Microsoft released the September 2026 non-security preview update (22 Sept 2026) for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 to apply this, deploy the update or update your time zone policies before 1 Nov 2026.

Time zone change: British Columbia will remain on Permanent DST (UTC-7); Microsoft released the September 2026 non-security preview update (22 Sept 2026) for Windows 11 25H2 to apply this, schedule deployment to avoid fallback on 1 Nov 2026.

Time zone change: Manitoba will remain on Permanent DST (UTC-5) starting 1 Nov 2026; Microsoft is releasing the October 2026 Windows update to apply this, plan deployment to affected devices.

For cross-region SAP HANA disaster recovery on Azure, implement a 2+2 topology (two-node primary plus two-node DR) using SAP HANA System Replication and Pacemaker with SAPHanaSR-angi so the DR region offers local HA after failover.

Build a two-node kubeadm GPU development cluster using the reference topology: control plane on Standard_D8s_v6 and GPU worker on Standard_NC24ads_A100_v4 (Ubuntu 24.04), with Kubernetes v1.33, containerd, Flannel CNI, NVIDIA Container Toolkit, and NVIDIA Kubernetes device...

Microsoft partners are publishing transact-capable offers in Microsoft Marketplace you can purchase directly: for example, Heaviside AI's NiaShield deploys into Commercial, GCC High, Azure Government, or European subscriptions, runs entirely in volatile memory, and lets you...

sqlsimtools is now in public preview: an open-source workload simulation suite (modern successor to ostress.exe) you can use to simulate many concurrent SQL users and queries for SQL Server testing, available at aka.ms/sqlsimtools.

A guest case study demonstrates fine-tuning a 0.6-billion-parameter language model and serving it on a 6 GB consumer GPU via Microsoft Foundry Local to operate a nine-junction London traffic-signal simulation, showing on-device SLM feasibility for IoT traffic control.

Before selecting Copilot, agents, or other AI tools, pick one recurring piece of work your team does, map its inputs, outputs, and pain points, and use that mapped process to decide if and how to automate.

Run Microsoft's DSC linter on your PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) files to catch and fix configuration errors before applying them to nodes.

No Azure service change is announced in this community video listing, so no action is required, and you can watch Nicholas Chang's 'The Agent Can Propose, the Platform Must Decide' for governance approaches to platform-driven infrastructure operations.

Follow this hands-on guide to create and run your first custom GitHub Copilot CLI agent so you can test and iterate on customised agent behaviours in your environment.

Add verifiable capability descriptions, challenge-based validation, reputation tracking, and behaviour-change detection to your Azure agent orchestrator: the session presents a trust-aware framework for Azure AI Agents and Copilot Studio that is compatible with existing MCP and...

Watch Nicholas Chang's YouTube video 'Agentic Azure Insights Day 6' for a community-sourced update on agentic AI topics related to Azure.

Watch Nicholas Chang's community video to learn practical agent coordination and orchestration patterns for implementing multi-agent AI workflows on Azure AI Foundry, then apply those patterns to your projects or prototypes.

Nicholas Chang's community video demonstrates an autonomous document agent built with Azure AI for insurance claims; watch it to follow a concrete example you can reuse when prototyping document ingestion, extraction, and agent orchestration.

Add MITRE ATT&CK and Snort rule sets into OpenWebUI and Ollama as a local knowledge base to run a local cybersecurity AI that keeps sensitive data on-premises and produces ATT&CK-mapped, rule-based detections.

Watch Part 1 to learn how ToolSmith lets you describe a workflow, reviews a proposed plan, then builds an EmployeeWorks plugin after you approve it (demo includes enterprise search for policy lookup and a travel-booking cancellation plugin).

Learn to implement Durable AI agents using the Durable Task Extension for Microsoft Agent Framework in C#/.NET: apply orchestration patterns (chaining, fan-out/fan-in, human intervention), host agents on Azure, and monitor with the Durable Task Scheduler visualisation.

Create an IT Support agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio with no coding required, and configure Adaptive Cards to surface formatted issue details, tables, and action buttons inside Teams for end-to-end support workflows.

Pilot updating your development workflows and team roles to direct AI agents rather than only adding AI tools: experiment with agent-directed code generation and review loops, revise sequential SDLC gates, and train engineers on prompt and agent orchestration skills.

Adopt the Composite Semantic Layer pattern: have each domain own its ontology, add a thin coordination tier (Foundational Ontology Model, semantic registry, link graph) to keep domains interoperable, and map orchestration to Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, governance and...

If you manage Android Enterprise devices with Microsoft Intune, review the new and upcoming Intune Android Enterprise management capabilities for generative AI presented at the session and plan any policy or configuration changes.

Pilot workflows that direct AI agents rather than relying solely on hand-written code: revisit sequential SDLC stages and team structure so engineering teams can adapt to agent-driven development and remain competitive.

No official Azure product change is announced in this community video 'Agentic Azure Insights - Day 3'; there is no immediate action required from practitioners, watch the video for community commentary on agentic/AI topics if relevant to your work.

Watch the fourth video in the How AI Reads Text for AI-901 series for four practical questions to apply when using AI to read large volumes of text to surface recurring issues, for example repeated product complaints.

Not an Azure announcement: the video raises ethical questions about everyday AI use, so schedule a team discussion and review your organisation's AI usage and governance policies for tools you run or procure.

Podcast episode: Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich discuss TikTok clips about declining reading, attention spans, and AI's effects on critical thinking, informational listening only, no Azure configuration change required.

Run the RateMyKeyVault grader to score your Azure Key Vaults from A to F, then use the report to prioritise remediations for misconfigurations and access issues.

Upcoming: 'Agentic Azure Insights' on 20 October; check the channel for the episode to catch updates and operational guidance on agent-based Azure tooling.

Update your small-business security training: watch this episode and review the linked GitHub resources to teach teams the differences between the Surface Web, Deep Web, and Darknet, and apply the episode's recommended do/don't controls and safer browsing practices.

Implement a six-layer AIOps framework: add data ingestion and normalisation, machine-learning analytics, event correlation and root-cause analysis, automated remediation, and real-time visualisation, and map correlated incidents into ITSM to reduce alert noise and enable...

If you are building multi-agent workflows in Microsoft Fabric, design a multi-agent architecture and prepare agent-ready data foundations by organising lakehouses, semantic models, and ontologies, and plan how Fabric Data Agents will integrate with M365 Copilot.

To build an enterprise SRE platform on Azure, define SLIs, SLOs and error budgets, instrument observability with Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and Azure Managed Grafana, and implement intelligent alerting, dashboards, and automated remediation using Azure...

No product changes or action items are listed in the Agentic Azure Insights 19 October community video; watch the recording for any implementation details or follow-up links.

To implement self-healing on Azure, update your observability telemetry, root-cause analysis pipelines, and remediation playbooks to incorporate agentic AI with Azure Automation for detection, analysis, and automated corrective actions, and add approval and rollback controls.

If you're building agentic AI workloads, use Azure Container Apps Jobs as the execution layer: have your agent split requests into independent containerised jobs, dispatch them, observe job results, and implement decision logic to retry or proceed on success or failure.

If you are replacing Personal Access Tokens, client certificates, or other long-lived secrets with OIDC in Azure, enable immutable subject (sub) claims so tokens present a stable identifier you can rely on for account mapping and lifecycle management.

Use Microsoft Agent Package Manager (APM) to manage skills and plugins across Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot by storing a shared manifest and a copy of the global lockfile in a repository (for example, agent-setup) to centralise agent configuration.

Before implementing Microsoft Fabric CI/CD, run a focused architecture questionnaire and document the decisions that will define your pipelines, environments, promotion approach, and operational ownership so your implementation matches team requirements.

Practitioners running distributed agents: adopt an agent control plane to centralise observation, decision-making, and control of those agents, and identify where it can consolidate telemetry, policy enforcement, or lifecycle operations.

If you run Microsoft Foundry with Azure API Management and GitHub MCP, measure MCP tool schema overhead by comparing full-schema versus curated-tool loading and choose the loading strategy that meets your latency and resource targets.

Integrate semantic-release into your EPAC pipeline so commit messages drive automatic semantic versioning of Azure Policy releases, removing the need for manual version bumps.

If you deploy AI agents, review and harden Entra Agent ID and the Agent Governance Toolkit governance and identity controls now, because the EU AI Office has begun enforcing the EU AI Act and sent formal requests to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Run azqr to classify Azure VMs into modernisation waves by role, owner, and required pre-migration checks before selecting target sizes, because a VM size list alone does not tell you how each VM should be migrated.

Begin testing A2A (Agent2Agent) interoperability across agent frameworks and vendors using the session's .NET and Python demos to implement Agent Cards, messages, tasks, artifacts, streaming, and discovery, and treat discovery and streaming as still evolving.

Add a semantic cache to your LLM pipeline: run APIM policies llm-semantic-cache-lookup and llm-semantic-cache-store on Azure AI Gateway, back it with Azure Managed Redis and embedding models on Microsoft Foundry, and tune TTL and similarity threshold; in a benchmark cache hits...

Install the free, open-source XrmToolBox plugin today to promote Contact Center workstreams, routing rules, queues, rulesets, and channels between Dev, Test, and Prod matched by name (not GUID), with dependency checks, a dry run, post-promotion verification, and rollback.

Implement NIST CSF 2.0's GOVERN function in your SME governance: apply the Organisational Context (GV.OC) guidance and use the linked GitHub artefacts as templates for policy, roles, and risk context.

This community essay reflects on AI's influence on software development and does not announce any Azure product changes or required practitioner actions, so no operational changes, migrations, or configuration updates are needed.

Review the security changes and improvements GitHub introduced to Actions over the past year and update your workflows accordingly to reduce supply-chain risk.

Watch the 16 Oct 2026 Azure Weekly Update for short briefings on ASR Arc support for VMware and physical servers, VMSS rebalancing, Standard Service Endpoints, cross-region Azure Files replication, Cloud HSM hardware audit logging, and MAI-Base-2/Maia 300, then follow the links...

AttendBeacon added native mobile apps, a speaker share kit, hotel and travel booking, an event budget, bookkeeping and ticket-platform links, support for 38 currencies and Polish, and an API your AI assistant can call, so update your event integrations or test the API to...

No Azure action: the Hanselminutes episode covers Michio Kaku's speculative blueprint for time travel, saying it requires the energy of a star and raises the grandfather paradox, so treat it as popular-science content rather than cloud engineering guidance.

No immediate Azure action required: this Hanselminutes/ACM ByteCast interview with Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard is an informational podcast on the foundations of quantum information science and quantum cryptography, useful for engineers tracking quantum-safe security...

To route GitHub Copilot CLI telemetry into Azure Application Insights, deploy an authenticated OpenTelemetry Collector on Azure Container Apps, configure Copilot CLI to export telemetry to that collector, and run KQL queries in Application Insights to analyse it.

LinkedIn Learning published a beginner course, 'Docker in Practice: Build, Debug, and Deploy Containers', on 14 Oct 2026; enrol if you want hands-on Docker guidance for building, debugging, and deploying containers.

No action required for Azure configurations: Scott Hanselman's podcast interviews Turing Award winners Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard on quantum information science and quantum key distribution, useful background for teams planning quantum-safe cryptography or researching...

Stop defaulting to the largest model in the catalogue: test smaller models for your chatbot or app because larger models are often slower, cost more, and can still return inconsistent answers if not configured for the task.

Don't default to the largest model in the catalog for a chatbot or app: pick a smaller, task-suitable model to cut latency and cost and to avoid inconsistent answers, and only use bigger models when you can configure them for the job.

No immediate Azure action required: this short video explains the 'computer use' concept for LLM agents, when to provide external tool integrations versus model-only workflows, and how agent tool harnesses change behaviour, so watch before designing integrations.

Install the Seculyze content from the Microsoft Sentinel Content hub and follow this hands-on guide to calibrate and tune your detection posture for Sentinel's unified SKU.

Pricing change: Azure VM prices have increased, run Gregor Suttie's small app to calculate the impact on your VM estate, then update budgets, consider rightsizing, and review reservation purchases to control spend.

Use this GH-300 GitHub Copilot exam checklist to verify you have covered the required topic areas and prep steps, and only book the GH-300 certification once every checklist item is complete.

Ricardo's data leak (~890,000 user accounts exposed) means you should force password resets for affected accounts, require MFA, notify and educate users about incoming SMS/WhatsApp phishing, and increase logging and alerts for suspicious logins.