Azure Feeds

Retirement: The Azure Key Vault Secrets Provider Extension for Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters will be retired on 9 October 2027, plan and migrate to the Azure Key Vault Secret Store Extension before that date.

Generally Available (GA): AKS will now provision and manage a StandardV2 NAT Gateway for clusters using an AKS-managed virtual network, and StandardV2 is the default managed NAT Gateway SKU for new clusters in supported regions when you choose the managedNATGateway outbound type,

GA: Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server is now generally available in the East US 3 region, you can deploy new flexible-server instances there or migrate/replicate workloads to that region.

Retirement: Microsoft Dev Box will be retired on 18 September 2028, with the closing-down process beginning 14 September 2026, so plan and migrate developer environments and workloads before those dates.

Retirement: Azure Deployment Environments will be retired on 22 February 2027, with closing-down starting 14 September 2026, so export or migrate deployment pipelines and environment configurations ahead of that schedule.

GA: Exceptions for Web Application Firewall on Azure Application Gateway and Azure Front Door are now generally available, so update your WAF policies to add exceptions where required for application-specific traffic.

Public preview: Microsoft Agent 365 integration with Azure API Management is now available; enable and evaluate this integration to connect your organisation's centralized governance with runtime enforcement for Microsoft Agent 365 (MCP) servers and tools.

Region expansion: Multiparty private offers in Microsoft Marketplace are now available in Hong Kong, enabling partners and ISVs to create and use multiparty private offers to procure third-party cloud and AI solutions for customers there.

Generally Available: Anyscale on Azure can now be deployed to your AKS clusters as a managed Ray platform to run distributed Python workloads and integrate with Azure services for production workloads.

Generally Available: starting with SQL Server 2025 CU9 and SQL Server 2022 CU27, SQL Server on Linux supports the bulkadmin fixed server role and the ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS permission for performing bulk data import operations, so plan upgrades and role assignments accordingl

Retirement: Beginning 30 September 2027, Azure Monitor will stop supporting the pod name dimension for AKS pod platform metrics (for example kube_pod_status_phase) and these metrics will transition to aggregate pod counters, so update any alerts, dashboards, Log Analytics queries

Retirement: Azure App Service on Azure Stack Hub will be retired on 30 Sep 2029; from 30 Sep 2026 new installations will not be supported and no new releases or features will be provided, so plan migration or select an alternative hosting strategy well before the retirement date.

Retirement: App Service support for Java 8, 11, and 17 ends on 1 Sep 2027; your apps will continue to run but will no longer receive security updates or customer support, so upgrade to a supported Java runtime, containerise, or otherwise remediate before that date.

Retirement: Always Encrypted with Intel SGX enclaves in Azure SQL Database will retire on 31 October 2027 as SGX-enabled DC-series hardware is phased out, so transition to Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) enclaves before that date.

Public preview: AKS on bare metal now supports Ubuntu, so you can deploy AKS clusters on Ubuntu-based bare-metal nodes; test in non-production and review the preview documentation for setup and known limitations.

Public preview: Azure HorizonDB (managed PostgreSQL) is expanding to additional Azure regions, so you can deploy HorizonDB closer to your apps and users, and should re-evaluate region placement and update deployment or IaC templates and tests to use the new regions.

GA: SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is now available in Azure Bleu (France sovereign cloud), so you can deploy SQL Server VMs to meet French data residency and sovereignty requirements; update ARM/Bicep/Terraform templates, deployment scripts, and compliance artefacts.

Starting 15 October 2026, Microsoft Fabric Search will return tables from semantic models, lakehouses, and mirrored databases as individual results, searchable by table name, description, or exact column-name match; update catalog integrations, documentation, and access controls

Public preview: Azure Backup for PostgreSQL flexible server and elastic cluster (v2) now captures physical backups from managed disk snapshots and stores them in Azure Backup vaults for long-term retention; validate restore procedures and configure vault retention and policies be

Public preview: Application Gateway WAF now inspects and enforces WAF rules for IPv6 traffic; test IPv6 listener and frontend configurations and validate rule behaviour before rolling out to production.

Public preview: Major version upgrades (MVU) for Azure Database for PostgreSQL elastic clusters let you upgrade an existing elastic cluster in-place to a supported newer PostgreSQL major version without provisioning a replacement cluster or migrating distributed data.

Retirement: DCsv3 and DCdsv3-series Azure Linux, Windows, and Dedicated Host virtual machines will be retired on 31 October 2029; they will not be available for use or purchase after that date, so plan and migrate your workloads to supported sizes before then.

Public preview: Microsoft-managed performance monitoring for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is now available, enabling monitoring without custom collection scripts or manual telemetry correlation, so evaluate the preview and plan migration from script-based monitoring.

Retirement: On 30 September 2026, Microsoft retired the NVv3-series VM SKUs Standard_NV12s_v3, Standard_NV12hs_v3, Standard_NV24s_v3, Standard_NV24ms_v3, Standard_NV32ms_v3, and Standard_NV48s_v3; if you run any of these VMs, plan to migrate or resize them to supported VM sizes a

Retirement: On 30 September 2026, Microsoft retired the NVv4-series VM SKUs Standard_NV4as_v4, Standard_NV4ahs_v4, Standard_NV8as_v4, Standard_NV8ahs_v4, Standard_NV16as_v4, Standard_NV16ahs_v4, Standard_NV32as_v4, and Standard_NV32ahs_v4; if you run any of these VMs, plan to mig

Preview: AKS adds Ubuntu 26.04 node images via a new Ubuntu2604 Minimal OS SKU for node pools; test package footprint, security posture, and compatibility in non-production node pools before selecting Ubuntu2604 for production clusters.

Announcement: Azure canvases for GitHub Copilot provide interactive, shared workspaces that embed Azure tools, dashboards, cost analysis, and hosted skills into Copilot conversations, so review access, governance, and cost controls before enabling for your teams.

Retirement: Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3, and Esv3 VM series will enter End-of-Life and retire in public cloud Azure regions on 15 November 2029; schedule migrations to supported VM families, update automation, and validate images well before that date.

Retirement: Azure Functions v1 hosting model on Azure Container Apps will be retired on 29 September 2027; after that date existing Functions v1 apps will stop running and processing triggers, so migrate or re-deploy them to a supported hosting model before retirement.

Generally Available: Lasv5 and Laosv5 storage-optimised VMs (5th Gen AMD EPYC Turin) are GA, offering 2-160 vCPUs, 8 GiB memory per vCPU, and 720 GB local NVMe per vCPU, so consider these SKUs for storage-intensive workloads and update deployment templates or size choices accordi

Public Preview: Automatic Zone Placement for Virtual Machine Scale Sets is now in public preview and will automatically choose availability zones for your scale sets based on SKU availability, capacity, and placement requirements, so opt into the preview to stop maintaining manua

Generally Available (GA) in Germany West Central: you can now connect SQL Server instances to Azure Arc to use Azure-based inventory, governance, security, assessment, and licence management, so schedule onboarding for servers you want managed from Azure.

Generally Available (GA) in Italy North: you can now connect SQL Server instances to Azure Arc to use Azure-based inventory, governance, security, assessment, and licence management, so plan onboarding for any Italy North servers you need managed from Azure.

Public preview: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server can now attach Azure Ultra Disk, so test and validate Ultra Disk for I/O-intensive, transaction-heavy PostgreSQL workloads and plan for the performance and cost implications.

Public preview: Microsoft-managed performance monitoring for Azure SQL Database is available, letting you monitor databases without building custom collection scripts or manually correlating telemetry, so evaluate moving observability to the managed monitoring.

Public preview: Performance monitoring for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server now exposes Microsoft-managed telemetry you can query via a telemetry endpoint and offers expanded visualisation options, so integrate the endpoint into your monitoring workflows.

GA: Azure SQL Database Hyperscale Premium adds 160-vCore and 192-vCore SKUs, providing up to 50% more compute capacity,update your capacity planning and select these SKUs when scaling larger workloads.

GA: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server supports cross-tenant customer-managed keys (CMK), allowing encryption with keys in an Azure Key Vault or Managed HSM in a different Microsoft Entra tenant, so update key access, role assignments, and rotation processes.

Public preview: script-based provisioning replaces legacy marketplace images for SQL Server on Linux Azure VMs, so test and migrate your VM deployment pipelines and automation to the new script-based provisioning workflow.

Generally Available: SQL Server on Azure Local Disconnected (ALDO) is now supported for environments that cannot maintain continuous Azure connectivity, so evaluate and deploy ALDO for air-gapped, highly regulated, or remote sites.

Generally Available: SQL Server on Azure Local connected mode lets you run SQL Server on Azure Local infrastructure while using Azure services for centralised management, monitoring, security, and licensing, so plan to connect via Azure Arc and update your operational practices.

Public preview: Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric provides a unified experience for discovering, managing, monitoring, and optimising databases across SQL Server and Azure SQL, so pilot the hub to consolidate discovery and operational workflows.

Generally Available: Database DevOps in SSMS powered by Microsoft.Build.Sql projects is now supported, so start using SQL database projects in SSMS as the local source-of-truth for schema changes and integrate them into your CI/CD pipelines.

Public preview: Azure SQL Hyperscale Serverless now supports auto-pause and auto-resume, so configure idle-time thresholds to pause databases to reduce cost and validate application cold-start behaviour on resume.

Generally Available: SQL Formatter for Visual Studio Code is now available, so install the extension and configure formatting rules to standardise SQL script style across your team.

Generally Available: SQL Migration Agent Skills are available to automate assessment, target selection, migration execution, and post-migration validation, so adopt these reusable AI-powered skills to standardise and speed SQL Server to Azure migrations.

Use the Azure Cosmos DB change feed plus Azure Functions to asynchronously push committed changes into Azure Managed Redis so your cache reflects writes without synchronous cache updates.

Follow the troubleshooting checklist for hybrid VPN gateway connections between on-premises networks and Azure: verify connection and gateway health, IPsec/IKE configuration, BGP and routing, and local gateway settings to isolate failures.

For small Azure Local hyperconverged deployments of three to four machines, design a switchless topology using direct storage links with dual top-of-rack switches to maintain connectivity and redundancy.

Use the baseline Azure Local hyperconverged reference architecture to build a connected, highly available deployment that combines hyperconverged storage with storage-switched networking for resilience.

Guidance: choose and implement the appropriate Key Vault multitenancy pattern,tenant-specific vaults, shared vaults, or other isolation models,and apply the described tenant isolation and access controls when designing multitenant solutions.

Select a tenancy model described for Application Insights and apply its telemetry isolation, access control, and feature configuration guidance to keep tenant data separated in multitenant systems.

Use Precisely Connect to perform real-time replication of mainframe and midrange data into Azure using change data capture, preserving committed changes as they occur.

Use the Databricks walkthrough as a template to build a four-stage, end-to-end stream processing pipeline in Azure Databricks for your streaming workloads.

Apply the Advanced AKS Microservices Architecture guidance to extend your AKS microservices baseline for greater scale and security in production deployments.

Apply the multitenant agentic systems guidance: enforce tenant isolation, define identity boundaries, impose tool-calling governance, and isolate state per tenant when designing agent-based services.

Public preview: AKS now supports multi-NIC (multiple network interfaces) per pod powered by DRANET, test this in non-production and update your network architecture and test plans if you need management, control, and data traffic separated or dedicated high-throughput/low-latenc

Azure Cosmos DB now provides a native Confluent Cloud connector experience: you can stream Cosmos DB change feed directly into Confluent Cloud, so plan to use the integrated connector when building or updating your event pipelines.

Azure App Service PHP images are switching Nginx packages from the deprecated deb.sury.org repository to the official nginx.org repository; update any build scripts, package pins, custom images, or firewall rules that reference deb.sury.org, and test PHP apps for Nginx behaviour

Start testing your TLS certificate ecosystem for post-quantum (PQC) authentication compatibility now, and consider participating in Microsoft's PQC TLS Pilot Program to evaluate certificate and TLS handshake behaviour before PQC algorithms are required.

Azure Functions Hosted Skills adds dynamic workflows: the model emits a one-time plan (a DAG) that Durable Functions executes after the triggering invocation, enabling durable multi-step AI-led post-invocation work and reducing token use and latency per the blog's benchmarks.

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.

If you set a Default Passkey Profile to Device-bound-only with AAGUID restrictions, be aware pilot users can still register a synced iCloud Keychain passkey (appears as "Passkey (Synced) - iCloud Keychain"); review the Security info page and tenant warning banner, and remove or r

Aspire 13.6 adds dashboard persistence and run history, storing telemetry and run data across restarts in a local SQLite database accessed via Dapper, so upgrade to 13.6 to retain dashboard history after restarts.

Azure DevOps Wiki now replaces the old editor with a Monaco-based editor (the same editor tech as Visual Studio Code), bringing VS Code-like editing capabilities while preserving existing Wiki features; test editor-dependent workflows and update team documentation or training.

Retirement: Starting 1 April 2027, Microsoft Graph file APIs will no longer return pre-authenticated (tempauth) URLs, so update any app or service that relies on tempauth links to authenticate file API requests with Microsoft Entra ID access tokens.

Test App Service for Linux Platform Release Channels and use WebSSH for custom containers (demonstrated in the community standup) to validate runtime patches and inspect failing backend connections during troubleshooting.

Use the Microsoft Foundry guide to map your document extraction workload against extraction architecture, layout requirements, deployment constraints, and evaluation criteria to decide whether to adopt Azure Document Intelligence or Azure Content Understanding.

Microsoft Security's FORGE Lab is scaling frontier AI vulnerability research from Windows to the Linux kernel, so security teams should monitor FORGE advisories and proactively assess Linux-kernel attack surface, patching, and detection across your fleet.

Organise and expose supply-chain, sourcing, design, and fleet-operation telemetry as labelled, versioned datasets and feedback loops so infrastructure teams can onboard AI systems that learn from lifecycle artefacts.

Microsoft.Data.SqlClient includes a new connection pool that grows faster under concurrent connection requests, so test it in your apps to reduce connection-establishment latency when many requests open connections simultaneously.

Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial AIoT Platforms, so include Microsoft Industrial AIoT offerings in vendor shortlists and run proof-of-concepts for industrial AIoT procurement and integration.

Register or block time for the SQL and AI in-person events on 16-17 Oct 2026 (SQL AI App in a Day workshop, Sanford, Florida, on 16 Oct; Orlando's 19th Annual event on 17 Oct): check the Azure SQL Dev Corner post for registration and agendas.

Use the provided PowerShell and Microsoft Graph automation patterns to manage Microsoft Entra ID user lifecycles,identify and disable leavers, remove licences, and record actions,to streamline and standardise offboarding.

C# Dev Kit has been rebuilt: solutions now open in about one second and the extension uses a fraction of the previous memory, so update to the new release to reduce startup time and memory footprint.

Aspire 13.6 introduces Native AOT for the dashboard, improving startup and deployment times, so test and adjust your Blazor, Fluent UI, JSON, and Dapper code paths for AOT compatibility before upgrading.

Configure an Azure Monitor alert to notify administrators when an Azure VPN Gateway tunnel enters the Disconnected state so you can investigate and mitigate site-to-site hybrid connectivity outages promptly.

When migrating from PostgreSQL to Azure SQL, expect connection-related migration complexity: review the 'PostgreSQL to SQL Field Notes: Connections' guidance and allocate time to test and validate connection behaviour before cutover.

CISOs should assess AI-powered vulnerability management tools and update vulnerability mitigation and resilience plans accordingly, folding the post's recommendations into governance and risk workflows.

Preview: Azure Functions Agent bindings for Python add bounded AI agentic reasoning to Python Function apps while keeping deterministic application code in control, so try the preview to add agentic capabilities to your serverless Python workloads.

Preview: Azure CLI 2.91.0 adds a terminal command to diagnose Linux web app configuration and runtime errors, and access-restriction updates now preserve unrelated site configuration to prevent accidental overwrites.

Azure Functions now supports managed connectors to 1,700 services, with triggers and typed clients for supported connectors, so you can integrate SharePoint, Azure Content Understanding, and Teams directly into your serverless workflows.

Use MSTest together with Microsoft.Testing.Platform to run and debug UI tests for UWP and WinUI 3 apps against packaged, unpackaged, and AppContainer hosts, and apply the blog's setup and example test patterns for local runs and CI integration.

Read the new create-cosmos-agent guidance from the Azure Cosmos DB Blog to organise agent memory, implement per-customer data isolation, and add source-tracing for answers when building Cosmos DB-backed AI agents.

If you are the only developer on a Cosmos DB project, RBAC is not required for your app to run: you can continue using account keys and key-based authentication instead of immediately adopting RBAC.

If Visual Studio sign-in to Azure Resource Manager fails with AADSTS500571 (invalid_grant), the guest user object is disabled in the resource tenant (for example tenant 72f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47), so enable the guest account in that resource tenant or sign in with an a

Microsoft Teams B2B Direct Connect lets you run cross-tenant collaboration without creating guest accounts, so plan for users to use native accounts in each tenant (CompanyA, CompanyB, CompanyC) and configure Direct Connect for cross-tenant Teams collaboration instead of adding g

When porting Elasticsearch search requests to Azure Cosmos DB, rewrite queries to use Cosmos DB full-text search functions where they map and implement features that do not map via additional queries or application-layer logic as demonstrated in the tutorial.

GA: Data API Builder v2.1.5 (stable) adds native SQL json and vector data type support for REST and GraphQL endpoints; upgrade to 2.1.5 if you expose json or vector columns and validate client serialization and schema mapping.

Aspire 13.6 adds richer terminal emulation and docked terminals for REPLs, so update your apps to call WithTerminal() and follow the new attach and automation steps to enable and script interactive terminal sessions against app resources.

Genspark shows storing and protecting live AI agent sessions with Azure Cosmos DB Global Secondary Indexes, so if your agents maintain multi-step sessions adopt Cosmos DB Global Secondary Indexes for durable, queryable session state.

GA: Azure Cosmos DB Shell is now available in the Azure portal Data Explorer, giving you a terminal-style interface to navigate databases and containers, run NoSQL queries, inspect resources, and update data directly in the portal.

Microsoft's 2026 Digital Defense Report finds government agencies accounted for 27% of observed cyber activity in 2026 (up from 17% in 2025), so public-sector security teams should reassess threat models, supplier risk, and incident response readiness.

The 2026 Microsoft Digital Defense Report emphasises a more interconnected security environment, so security teams should review cross-domain visibility, detection and response playbooks, and third-party risk coverage to address cascading threats.

General availability: Azure Pipelines now supports GitHub-hosted agents with pay-as-you-go pricing; you can run pipelines on native Apple silicon, and larger Linux and Windows VMs, and pay only for pipeline execution time instead of buying parallel-job capacity.

When migrating from Elasticsearch to Azure Cosmos DB, translate each Elasticsearch mapping into Cosmos DB container configuration, because Cosmos DB is schema-agnostic and has no single mapping document, so you must configure storage and indexing via container settings.

Copilot UX components for SharePoint Framework will be Generally Available in October 2026; SPFx 1.24 Beta 5 is available now (React 18 support coming in 1.24), so update test projects and validate Node.js compatibility before the GA.

GA: Network security perimeter metrics are now generally available in Public Cloud via Azure Monitor,enable and query these metrics to create dashboards, alerts, and operational monitoring for access patterns and unexpected traffic behaviour.

Review Microsoft's Ignite 2026 Security guide and plan to attend or watch the sessions and demos that cover the AI-first, end-to-end security platform protecting identities, devices, data, applications, clouds, infrastructure, and AI agents.

azd (Azure Developer CLI) added dependency-aware extension uninstall and versioned extension contracts, top-level infrastructure and service layers in project configuration, deployment-phase concurrency limits, and local-socket transport for external authentication hosts: update

Copilot Code Reviews for Azure Repos (public preview) now offers configurable effort levels to control how much time Copilot spends on a pull request review, along with bug fixes and feature improvements, so set the effort level when creating reviews to balance review depth and l

Plan to deploy the IBM Spectrum Symphony Provider Plugin for Azure Compute Fleet so Spectrum Symphony can dynamically access and manage Azure compute capacity for large-scale AI, analytics, and HPC workloads.

Azure is introducing more efficient datacentre systems and Circular Centers to extend hardware service life; update your asset refresh plans, hardware disposal and procurement expectations, and sustainability reporting to reflect longer lifecycles.

Operators of internet-facing Zimbra mail servers should implement Microsoft Threat Intelligence's published mitigation guidance and detection recommendations for CVE-2026-73570, and hunt for the indicators of compromise and attack paths described in the report.

Evaluate migrating Elasticsearch-backed search into Azure Cosmos DB's built-in full-text search when your application data already lives in Cosmos DB, to consolidate operational data and search and potentially improve price-performance; use the Azure Cosmos DB Migration Guide for

Use Work IQ Developer Tools (WIQD) to package and register an existing or new plugin, containing skills, MCP servers, or agents, into the Microsoft Copilot plugin registry; import the plugin into WIQD and follow the Copilot packaging workflow.

Cosmos DB mirroring in Microsoft Fabric now supports Virtual Network Data Gateways: provision a gateway inside your VNet to keep public network access disabled during setup and for ongoing replication of private-endpoint secured Cosmos accounts.

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.

Aspire 13.6 persists dashboard telemetry across runs, adds in-dashboard container exec shells, first-party Java and Rust hosting, portable volume paths, and previews Azure Container Apps Sandboxes (preview).

If you use MSP360 RMM or ScreenConnect, audit for unauthorised ScreenConnect deployments and redundant remote-access channels, revoke suspicious MSP360 accounts or sessions, rotate credentials, and enable multi-factor authentication while increasing monitoring for persistence and

GenAI makes trustworthy document extraction more critical: assess whether you need precise, structured outputs (use Azure Document Intelligence) or broader semantic content pipelines and integration (use Azure Content Understanding), then update your ingestion pipeline accordingl

Azure SDK September 2026 release is available; review the release notes, identify which client packages you use, and schedule upgrades to address any security fixes, deprecations, or breaking changes noted.

Intune adds staged app and policy rollouts to reduce deployment risk, a consolidated device investigation view for troubleshooting, and expanded advanced management capabilities for more government organisations, so review your rollout stages and troubleshooting workflows.

GA: Azure Lasv5 and Laosv5 local-storage-optimised VMs (5th Gen AMD EPYC) are now generally available,consider them for storage-heavy workloads that require high local NVMe capacity, throughput, I/O performance, and improved networking.

Guide showing how to run and tune Qwen3.8-27B on a single Azure H100 Spot GPU VM with example throughput and costs (3 hours served 1,434 requests; VM time cost $4.65 at that region's Spot price, dashboard counts ~$2/hr), follow the steps to reproduce.

Reference architecture and runnable repo to implement a governed, event-driven AI intake pipeline using Azure Integration Services and Microsoft Foundry, including authenticated entry, controlled model consumption, durable asynchronous processing, explicit failure handling, and...

SKU addition: Microsoft-Decision-1 has been added to the Microsoft Foundry Models Catalog for high-volume decision and classification workloads, use it when you need fast, structured choices (classify, select, score, verify) instead of open-ended text generation.

Public preview: Microsoft Agent 365 now integrates with Azure API Management to let AI administrators discover and govern gateway-managed MCP servers and tools and enable runtime enforcement for APIM V2 and AI Gateway tiers,enable the integration in Agent 365 and configure APIM...

Update: Copilot Notebooks will arrive on Frontier in the coming weeks with improvements to create notebooks, work with Copilot, and create or edit artefacts without leaving the Notebooks workspace, so prepare Frontier users and update any internal how-to guidance.

Change: Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is now integrated into the Microsoft Copilot app so you can create, edit, and collaborate on Office artefacts directly from Chat or Cowork,start validating workflows in the Copilot app for your teams.

Change: Title Plan (Instructor-Led Training courseware) updates have moved to a weekly publishing cadence,check http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan to always work from the current version.

Event notice: ESPC Microsoft 365 and AI 2026 runs 30 November-3 December 2026 at RAI Amsterdam; schedule attendance if you need direct briefings and sessions on Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams, and SharePoint.

Update to Viva Engage email delivery: Engage will favour the most appropriate notification channel to avoid sending email to users without a supported mailbox (previously Engage could still attempt such emails), so review your organisation's notification and mailbox settings.

When you see an unexpected slowdown in Azure SQL Database, use Query Store to compare captured execution plans and check index usage changes,the example shows a query regressing from using a CustomerId index to scanning the clustered index, which explains the slowdown.

If you run transaction-intensive PostgreSQL, do not scale by vCores alone: test storage I/O, workload concurrency, high availability, and database configuration under realistic, sustained OLTP benchmarks (see the Principled Technologies evaluation of Azure Database for...

Partners must review the FY27 incentives changes effective 1 October 2026: claims submitted on or before 30 September 2026 use the prior terms, while claims submitted from 1 October 2026 onward will be assessed under the updated targeting and availability rules.

If you plan to attend OCP Global Summit 2026, visit Microsoft at Booth C73 and attend the keynote "Intelligence Infrastructure: Scaling AI for the Frontier Era" on 13 October, 9:15 to 9:35 at SJCC South Hall for sessions on co-design across silicon, systems, software, and...

When evaluating voice agents, use a voice user simulator that plays the user's role with goal-driven scenarios and configurable acoustic conditions to scale tests, capture timing and vocal variation, and produce consistent comparisons versus costly human testing or static...

After restoring a database you plan to add as an Azure SQL Data Sync member, remove leftover Data Sync metadata from the restored database (or restore a clean copy) before joining it to a new sync group to prevent synchronization failures.

Run deterministic SQL locally for exact-shape requests (counts, aggregates, exact filters) before sending them to a local LLM planner, to avoid incorrect model-inferred results, reduce accelerator usage, and keep latency predictable.

Azure CLI on macOS now supports native OS broker authentication, so plan to upgrade to the CLI release that includes the broker flow and switch to the broker-based login required by enterprise identity policies.

When Power BI is slow over millions of Oracle rows, measure and isolate the entire retrieval path (Oracle query, network, gateway, Power BI) to identify the actual bottleneck before changing connectors or scaling compute.

Publish your software offer on Microsoft Marketplace and treat the listing as a distribution channel to reach SMB customers, using Marketplace programs and integrations to scale customer acquisition.

When using Foundry's multi-turn evaluators for voice agents, validate task-completion and rubric scores against human labels, check run-to-run agreement and agent ranking, and tune evaluators before relying on automated decisions.

Microsoft Purview DLP introduces a policy to stop Microsoft 365 Copilot from grounding responses in external or unverified sender emails, so administrators should configure this policy to restrict Copilot grounding to trusted internal mail to reduce cross-prompt injection risk.

Microsoft Purview DLP adds a rule to prevent sensitive data from being sent to external web search when Microsoft 365 Copilot's web search is enabled, so admins should enable and tune that DLP rule to stop credit card, passport, and SSN data from reaching Bing queries.

When expanding an agent's scope by adding tools or knowledge sources, expect more choices, context, and execution paths and plan for that added complexity so the agent remains reliable as it scales.

Nebraska.Code 2026 was a community conference with Microsoft MVPs presenting sessions and networking opportunities; there are no platform changes announced in the recap.

Partners: pursue the Digital Sovereignty specialization to validate capabilities delivering secure, compliant, locally governed solutions using Microsoft Sovereign Cloud and to respond to earlier sovereignty requirements from customers.

If you investigate potentially unwanted applications (PUA) on Linux with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, follow this Tech Community post to locate where MDE surfaces PUA audit events on Linux and collect those events for investigation.

Partners: start building a digital sovereignty practice using Microsoft Sovereign Cloud and target the Digital Sovereignty specialization to meet customer requirements on data residency, operator access, encryption, resilience, and where AI workloads run.

Noise reduction for Azure Deployment Stacks What-If was co-released with the GA of What-If; enable or configure noise reduction to suppress irrelevant diffs in your deployment what-if results.

Certificates used by Windows Update expire on May 17, 2027 and June 19, 2027; update your devices or apply Microsoft-provided solutions before those dates to keep Windows Update connectivity.

Logitech Rally Bar 2, Tap IP 2, and Tap Scheduler 2 are now certified on the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform and are rolling out globally, so plan procurement, configuration, and device security policies accordingly.

If your RAG pipeline ignores SharePoint metadata, implement a metadata-aware retrieval stage or use Foundry IQ so agentic RAG can return results that include root cause, severity, owner, and other metadata.

Microsoft Marketplace added 265 new offers (Aug 28-31, 2026); review the newly listed solutions such as AB Support and Acumens Vendor Deposits & Prepayments Management for trials or procurement.

Importing external key material into Azure Key Vault creates a new key version; because Azure Storage CMK may require the original CMK version to unwrap its account encryption key, re-importing the same material under a new version will not restore access.

Azure Logic Apps Automation is now in public preview with announced pricing and a monthly free grant that includes one managed environment per subscription, so start testing within the free quota and plan for billed usage after the grant.

Claude Haiku 5.5 is now available in Microsoft Foundry; consider using it for high-volume, cost-sensitive agent tasks to get faster execution and roughly 75% lower cost than Claude Haiku 4.5 for most tasks.

Microsoft Access now supports Big Forms: form width and each vertical section can be up to 2,000 inches, and combined section height up to 2,100 inches, update form designs, templates, and display tests to use or accommodate the larger design surface.

ESPC Microsoft 365 and AI in Amsterdam (30 Nov-3 Dec 2026) is open for registration; use code Microsoft200 to get a €200 discount on your ticket.

GA: Microsoft Sentinel's ASIM EmailEvent schema is now available, map your email data sources to the EmailEvent fields and update parsers, detections, and investigation content so rules work consistently across supported email products.

Microsoft published a standard Event Recap template for event producers, customise and publish the template to speed post-event highlights, ensure consistent messaging, and amplify speakers, sponsors, and volunteers across Microsoft channels.

Restructure Microsoft Foundry evaluation judge prompts to enable prefix caching and reduce LLM-as-judge token costs, and review evaluation batch configurations to cut judge call volume.

With Azure HorizonDB's disaggregated storage, review and adjust PostgreSQL memory and buffer-manager settings because many defaults assume an OS page cache that no longer applies.

Use the Marketplace value calculator in App Advisor to generate a tailored 3-year projection of Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace benefits for your business.

Apply expanded security and governance controls for agents on the Microsoft AI and Agent Platform, because agents that take actions can access sensitive data, call APIs, invoke tools, and act with delegated permissions.

If you have a query hash in Azure SQL Database, use Query Store to retrieve the SQL text and query ID, then inspect and tune the identified statements as shown in the article.

Generally Available: Anyscale on Azure is GA, you can run the Ray runtime as a managed service on AKS inside your subscription (control plane operated by Anyscale), backed by an SLA and production support, so plan network, identity, and production deployment accordingly.

Implement governance for AI agents across Resources, Builders, Behaviour, and Cost using Azure services and Microsoft Foundry to gain visibility, guardrails, and cost accountability as agent counts scale.

Microsoft AI Tour starts 12 Oct 2026; to sponsor and receive the 2026-2027 sponsorship guide, contact [email protected].

Microsoft is sponsoring Oracle AI World 2026; register to attend and stop by booth #10028 to discuss Oracle AI Database@Azure and hear the four-cloud panel featuring Brett Tanzer.

Public preview: the Azure Arc Multicloud Connector can automatically discover eligible Amazon EKS and Google GKE clusters in connected AWS accounts and GCP projects and onboard them to Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, so connect your cloud accounts and enable the connector to start

General Availability (GA): Exchange Online now supports Sending from Aliases, allowing users to send mail from any configured alias/proxy SMTP address; review tenant settings and enable the feature where appropriate.

Action required by 30 November 2026: ApiManagement is expanding control-plane IPs included in the ApiManagement service tag, replace any hard-coded API Management IP addresses in NSGs, UDRs, and firewalls with the ApiManagement service tag to avoid management access disruption.

Manitoba will permanently remain on UTC-5 from 02:00 on 1 November 2026 (no fall-back); Microsoft will publish an update to support the change, review systems with timezone-dependent scheduling and await Microsoft's update.

Retirement: Azure SQL Database will retire Always Encrypted Intel SGX enclave functionality on 31 October 2027; to retain secure-enclave capabilities, move databases off DC-series compute to a supported standard-series non-DC tier and update applications to VBS enclave mode befor

Use Azure Storage Actions to perform no-code, bulk access-tier changes (Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive) across many blobs instead of scripting per-blob updates; define conditions and run Storage Actions to move tiered data at scale.

Implement the Tauri v2 Rust-bridge pattern (desktop/mobile → Rust bridge → Rocket server → local retrieval → SSE) shown here to stream grounded chat while keeping JWTs, base URL, HTTP client, and SSE events correlated for correctness and security.

Microsoft Marketplace now emphasises connected discovery, trials, comparisons, and purchase flows to match organisational buying needs; use the Marketplace to trial and evaluate solutions before procurement decisions.

Retirement: Azure AD Graph API (legacy graph.windows.net) has been retired (shutdown completed July 1, 2025); upgrade any older Azure CLI (az ad) or Az PowerShell installations that still call Azure AD Graph to current releases that use Microsoft Graph.

GA: Remote PC connections in Windows App on Windows are now generally available, you can access and manage physical and virtual Windows devices alongside Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Microsoft Dev Box in one app, and users can sign in without a work or school account.

GA: Grok 4.7 from SpaceXAI is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry Models, select Grok 4.7 when you need advanced reasoning, long-horizon problem solving, software engineering, or agentic workflows in your AI applications.

Join the Frontier Innovation Series: Agent-a-thon, a hands-on experience for builders, technologists, and decision-makers to practice designing and implementing intelligent agents and agent-powered workflows.

Attend the Frontier Innovation Series: Secure Your AI Innovation and Frontier Journey to learn operational patterns, governance, and security controls for deploying AI with trust and compliance.

Attend the Microsoft Agent Bootcamp in Miami on 10 December 2026 for a hands-on day to learn how to build, deploy, and scale intelligent agents and agentised solutions for business outcomes.

Attend the Microsoft Agent Bootcamp in Boulder on 28 October 2026 for an immersive, hands-on session focused on building, deploying, and scaling AI agents with Microsoft tools and patterns.

GA: GitOps with Argo CD extension for AKS is now generally available, deploy the Microsoft-managed Argo CD extension to run upstream Argo CD on AKS with integrated security, observability, and operational support for production use.

Read the October 2026 partner update for AI Cloud Partner Program changes, resources, and guidance, and note Microsoft Ignite will run 17-20 November 2026 to plan skills, investments, and partner motions.

Copilot Studio now generates agents and reusable skills from descriptions, lets you choose models, connect MCP tools and specialist agents, run Evaluations for quality testing, trigger email-driven workflows with human review, trace Activity paths, and generate full-stack apps on

GA: Study and Learn Agent is now generally available, supports 50 languages, includes improved image handling, and appears when you open Copilot in Microsoft Education tenants (aka.ms/studyandlearn), so update your deployment and educator guidance.

314 new offers went live in Microsoft Marketplace (published 25-27 Aug 2026), including AI apps and agents such as Kore.ai's AI for Service for India, review the new listings and update procurement or trial plans accordingly.

Change your delivery sequence: build agent projects in three stages, start with a business brief, validate with low-cost experiments, then move to production infrastructure and hosting to avoid unnecessary time and cost.

Migration: Android device management is moving out of Teams Admin Center into the Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal, which becomes the primary management experience for Teams Rooms on Android, Teams Phones, Teams Panels, and SIP devices, deadline October 2026, so start planning

If you're moving agentic applications to production on your organisation's managed Kubernetes cluster, don't just run the container: validate that your platform tooling, approved network model, and security posture support agent workloads before deployment.

Partner guide for Microsoft Ignite 2026 signals practical partner focus areas: prioritise AI-in-production scenarios, measurable business outcomes, and built-in security, governance, and responsible AI when planning offers and sessions.

Public preview: Azure Backup for PostgreSQL flexible servers and elastic clusters (v2) is now in public preview, offering physical snapshot-based backups, scalable protection, flexible retention, vaulted backups, and direct-to-server restores,test your backup/restore and retentio

Use Engage analytics' existing views to measure reach, participation, and engagement across networks, communities, posts, and campaigns today, and use those metrics to inform your next communications actions while planned enhancements roll out.

Pricing/incentive change: Growth margin is live (from Oct 1, 2026), eligible CSP direct bill partners and distributors can earn incremental margin on qualifying new-to-offer, seat expansion, or strategic SKU mix growth for Microsoft 365 Copilot, M365 E5, M365 E7, Microsoft Defen

Design retrieval systems to go beyond query text: apply LLMs to extract structured signals from natural language inputs so ranking and retrieval can use cues users embed in their language rather than relying on keywords alone.

Security update: Remote Desktop Protocol is moving toward post-quantum aware TLS 1.3 hybrid handshakes to mitigate future CRQC risks, so audit your RDP endpoints and plan client and server updates and testing for PQC-capable TLS support.

DevOps update: Marketplace Ingestion MCP lets you bring Marketplace publishing into your agentic development workflow by using natural language and AI agents to create, validate, publish, and manage offers instead of manually constructing API payloads,consider automating your off

Foundry Agent Service now provides versioned, managed voice agents that consolidate speech, real-time models, turn detection, and orchestration, but you must still design identity and authorization, data retention, and network isolation, implement operational monitoring, and acco

GA: Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local is now generally available, enabling disaster recovery for Azure Local cluster virtual machines by replicating workloads to Azure with a streamlined experience,evaluate and enable ASR for your Azure Local-hosted workloads.

Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter (October 2026) is published: review the product group and community updates, and the Ace Aviator feature, for any announced changes to Logic Apps behaviour, connectors, templates, or operational guidance that might affect your integration projects.

When adopting AI agents, treat them as a new asset class and apply standard IT governance: inventory agents, assign accountability, define permissible network and data access, and implement monitoring, auditing, and retention controls.

Banks deploying agents at scale must explicitly choose runtime hosting and network isolation to balance agent autonomy with regulatory control; evaluate Microsoft options like Copilot Studio and design for hardened hosting, network segmentation, and operational oversight.

Build a local hybrid retrieval layer for on-premises RAG on health records: apply conversation-aware query rewrite and expansion, generate BGE-M3 embeddings locally, and run concurrent vector and lexical searches in DocumentDB.

Update your skilling programmes to combine AI-powered training tools with human-focused coaching and support so employees gain the confidence and skills needed to apply AI in their day-to-day work.

GA: Partners can now earn the new Clinical Applications specialization for Dragon Copilot,review the requirements and start attainment to unlock co-sell and referral eligibility, funding, Azure bulk credits, deployment support, and go-to-market assets.

If you use Microsoft Foundry, start reviewing Insights (evidence-linked, reviewable findings) and use the published benchmarks and LLM-judge assessments to validate trace linkage, finding quality, and detection of known issues.

GA: Windows 11, version 26H2 is now generally available; plan your rollout using the new enablement package option, follow the updated support lifecycle guidance, and use the provided adoption and device management resources.

Apply the Part 2 guidance to monitor Azure Container Apps resource consumption, detect over-provisioned replicas, distinguish app allocation from billed dedicated node capacity, and right-size workloads to reduce ACA costs.

Released: September 2026 V2 Exchange Server Security Updates are available for Exchange Server SE RTM, Exchange Server 2019 CU14 and CU15, and Exchange Server 2016 CU23; note organisations must be enrolled in the Period 2 ESU programme to access the 2019 and 2016 updates, so sche

Education IT should evaluate the new Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch (Snapdragon X2 Plus) for campus deployments, testing charging, display, portability, and application compatibility before mass rollouts.

Title Plan update: the Instructor-Led Training title plan is now available at aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan and will be published weekly, so check the page each week to keep courseware and ILT materials current.

Partners serving healthcare should review the IAMCP Profiles in Partnership conversation for practical examples of using cross-team collaboration and partner models to drive outcomes beyond technology in customer engagements.

When evaluating agent trajectories in Microsoft Foundry, batch multiple evaluators into a single LLM judge call to avoid reprocessing identical context and reduce evaluation cost per trajectory.

If your runbook fixes and postmortems live in databases but search cannot reach them, verify and configure connectors, indexes, and retrieval pipelines so diagnostic knowledge is discoverable and not repeatedly re-diagnosed.

To reduce Microsoft Foundry AI-path latency, shorten outputs, remove repeated prompt content, avoid unnecessary image/document processing and extra tool calls, reuse connections and context, and consider verified software optimisations plus Priority Processing (the 2,040-measurem

When rebuilding health-record or embedding indexes, replace 'delete then rebuild' workflows with bounded, resumable, generation-aware ingestion plus transactional publication (PostgreSQL and MySQL examples) so the last-known-good index stays available and partial refreshes do not

When deploying AI agents that take real-world actions, enforce execution boundaries by running agents inside OpenSandbox on AKS so model proposals are constrained by sandboxed execution and platform controls rather than allowing uncontrolled side effects.

Pricing change: Microsoft Foundry model deployment pricing updates take effect 1 Sep 2026 for the EU Data Zone and regional deployments outside the US, and a new APAC Data Zone has been launched, review pricing and region choices for your deployments.

Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop updates in September 2026 change Cloud PC provisioning, resilience, security, recovery, and IT management behaviour, review the release notes and update provisioning and management workflows as needed.

Partner change: eligible ACR workloads for AI Platform, AI Apps, App Modernization, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Azure VMware Solution have been updated to the FY27 rollover taxonomy, check the refreshed specialization pages and Partner Center to confirm your ACR workloads still c

You can run Ollaya decision models on Azure Container Apps using TypeSafe's Jev (released 15 Sep 2026) to handle bounded decision tasks instead of invoking a general-purpose LLM.

Deprecation: EWS in Exchange Online has begun; starting early October 2026, setting EWSEnabled to True alone will not keep EWS working, you must populate an AppID allowlist via EWSAllowedAppIDs to permit EWS access.

Microsoft Foundry now supports event-driven routines that connect triggers (schedule, timer, GitHub issue, Teams message) to queued agent actions, implement routines to invoke agents automatically without manual prompting.

GA: Copilot in SharePoint began rolling out 30 Sep 2026; October features add review, restructuring, publishing of generated HTML, and image/document reshaping and sharing, plan adoption, permission changes, and governance for generated content.

Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace launched 28 Sep 2026 and App Advisor maps its milestone-based benefits into a partner journey, use App Advisor to identify the right resources, milestones, and investments to publish and scale Marketplace revenue.

Process change: What's New in Microsoft Teams moves from a monthly to a quarterly cadence (next editions in December, March, and June), and AI agent work such as Teams Phone Agent will span the quarterly releases, adjust how you track and roll out Teams updates.

New MAI models are available in Microsoft Foundry: MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming for live speech-to-text, MAI-Voice-2.1 for expressive multilingual text-to-speech, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash optimised for responsive, high-volume voice applications, evaluate these for voice agents.

Use the AzAPI Terraform provider to deploy Foundry Hosted Agents as part of your IaC pipeline, so add AzAPI resources for Foundry Hosted Agents into your Terraform modules to version, review, and automate agent deployments.

Foundry IQ integration with Microsoft Copilot Studio is now generally available: connect a Foundry IQ knowledge base to Copilot Studio agents and configure Azure Private Link for zero public network exposure.

Microsoft outlines using ExpressRoute and AI Points of Presence (AI PoPs) to scale distributed AI GPU deployments, so evaluate ExpressRoute and AI PoP connectivity and placement when designing multi-region or edge AI infrastructure.

For partners, use a funded Copilot envisioning engagement as the commercial entry point for larger customers (around 300+ seats) to drive conversations about usage-based Copilot billing and FinOps governance.

Microsoft open-sourced the Postgres MCP Server (MIT licence), a Rust-based service that connects MCP-compatible coding agents to PostgreSQL so agents can inspect schema and run permitted operations across local, on-prem, Azure, AWS, or GCP deployments.

Preview: Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance, multitenant agent management, and the Azure API Management dedicated AI Gateway tier are available as preview capabilities alongside Microsoft Agent 365,test them under preview terms and expect limited regional availability.

Microsoft will present approaches at TM Forum Innovate Americas 2026 for telecom operators to move from pilots to AI-native operations by building trusted data, shared operational context, and governance to enable AI across network, customer, and business workflows.

Microsoft Marketplace published 202 new offers (Aug 21-24, 2026); review the catalogue for new managed services and SaaS offers such as A2Z Managed Services for Azure and ACOS, and update procurement or evaluation pipelines accordingly.

When releasing AI agents, implement consequence-aware release gates in Microsoft Foundry that check execution traces, tool-call limits, and policy enforcement so high semantic scores cannot mask disallowed actions or unsafe executions.

Action required: upgrade the ExchangeOnlineManagement PowerShell module to version 3.10.1 or newer to receive new Exchange Online authentication security enhancements, because older versions may not support future authentication requirements.

Public preview: Microsoft Purview adds a unified Classifiers experience,administrators should start using the new UI to discover, create, inspect, and manage classifiers and to review classified-item counts and policy dependencies before wider rollout.

Transition notice: Microsoft Advertising is moving from SOAP to REST and will deprecate the SOAP API on 31 January 2027, so plan to migrate or update integrations to REST because new features will be delivered on REST during the transition.

Available now: GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 are added to Microsoft Copilot as selectable models,choose them in Copilot model settings to change response style and behaviour while Work IQ continues to ground outputs in your organisation's data.

September 2026: Planner Agent is now built into basic plans, so teams will have AI assistance in Planner by default,review plan settings and permissions to control agent behaviour and update governance as required.

New developer experience: the Azure Functions Hosted Skills canvas in the GitHub Copilot app lets you build, run, and debug Function Apps with trigger controls and live logs beside the conversation, so try it to keep the development loop in one window.

Announcement: the IBM Spectrum Symphony Provider Plugin for Azure Compute Fleet enables bursting Symphony workloads into Azure,configure the provider plugin and Symphony Host Factory connector to extend capacity for HPC, AI, and analytics jobs.

Effective 30 September 2026: Digital Sovereignty specialization attainment and renewal move to Partner Center,partners must complete renewals and new attainments through Partner Center on their anniversary dates; ongoing manual enrollments can finish under the original process.

Device planning: Surface Pro for Business now offers optional 5G for field workers, so update device provisioning, connectivity policies, and security controls for staff who may rely on cellular instead of organisational Wi-Fi.

Enrollment open: the Frontier Partner specialization is now available in Partner Center,partners who build and govern AI agents across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, GitHub Copilot, Defender, Entra, and Purview should enrol and meet the published requirements.

Start using the Azure Connectors SDK in your .NET apps to call Logic Apps and Power Platform connectors with a typed client, offloading authentication, pagination, and error handling from your codebase.

Add an Agent Acceptance Gateway to your handover: have the application team call the Foundry project endpoint with the expected identity and verify the named agent can reach its configured services before declaring the agent ready.

Switch or test Microsoft Foundry embeddings to Cohere Embed V5 Pro or Embed V5 Fast to get stronger multimodal retrieval, support for 100+ languages, and flexible vector sizes for enterprise search and AI apps.

Evaluate Hotpatch for eligible Windows Server 2025 machines (via Azure) to reduce reboots when applying monthly security updates and to shrink maintenance windows for hybrid server fleets.

GA: Azure Virtual Desktop regional host pools are now generally available in East US 2 and Central US,create regional host pools to reduce cross-region metadata dependencies and improve service resiliency; Windows 365 will receive the same improvements via service-managed rollout

Start using Sentinel and Defender's new Case Management shared workspace for investigations, adopt Defender unified RBAC custom roles for GDAP, and use the Sentinel Data Lake Codeless Connector Framework to ingest multi-account data with fewer connectors; check the expanded conne

Review the September Agent 365 updates and adopt the new visibility, control, and governance capabilities to measure agent value, track resource consumption, and centralise policy across your agent estate.

When driving AI adoption, distinguish whether issues are skill gaps, motivation, or system barriers and target the response with focused training, incentives, or process changes to get teams to change how they work.

Enable the new auto retrieval reasoning effort mode for Foundry IQ Knowledge Bases to regain about 97.6% of high-effort evidence recall while using 46.9% fewer query planning tokens, reducing token costs on mixed retrieval workloads.

Microsoft is running Cybersecurity Awareness Month with role-based learning on AI Skills Navigator, expert sessions, and free events; review the available learning paths and join events to improve security practices relevant to your role.

Use the Assessment & Optimization Workbench local web application to pull Azure billing and Databricks compute data, select workspaces and dates, run analyses, and visualise costs and workload hotspots to prioritise optimisation work.

Download the updated interactive Microsoft Purview reference architecture for classification and labeling from GitHub to review how the new public previews make it possible to scale auto-labeling across your estate.

Microsoft 365 Champions launched a Champion Stories programme to collect filmed Copilot adoption case studies; submit your organisation's Copilot adoption story at aka.ms/ChampionStory to be considered for publication.

Microsoft Intune Settings Catalog now provides day-zero support for Windows 11, version 26H2 validated policy settings (rolling out globally); check your Intune tenant's Settings Catalog and author or update policies to adopt 26H2 features.

GPT-6.1 Sol is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry; evaluate it for production agents to compare capability and cost against earlier GPT-6 series models and consider testing migrations or new agent deployments.

Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric is now in public preview, centralising inventory, health, performance, security, and optimisation insights so you can consolidate database signals and follow guided actions to remediate issues.

Savings plan and reservation recommendations are now available at management group scope in the Azure Portal and via REST API, so evaluate and apply commitments across your organisational hierarchy to increase coverage and savings.

Auto-pause and auto-resume for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale Serverless is in public preview; enable it for new or existing Hyperscale Serverless databases to pause compute during idle periods (storage billing continues) and reduce costs.

Azure SRE Agent Plugins now support Azure DevOps repositories as plugin marketplaces, so point agents at your Azure DevOps repo to install and pin plugins without mirroring to GitHub.

Collect end-to-end execution traces (prompts, model responses, tool calls, latency, token usage, errors) alongside repeatable evaluation scores (task completion, tool-call accuracy, groundedness, safety) so you can diagnose agent failures rather than relying on scores alone.

If you certify hardware for Windows 11, continue using the existing WHCP baseline and Windows 11, version 25H2 certification process,Microsoft will not introduce a separate WHCP designation, HLK kit, or submission path for version 26H2.

Jamie Maguire created a job board to stop misleading "remote" listings, so if you recruit or are looking for genuinely remote or hybrid Azure-related roles, check the board for clarified remote/hybrid status and fuller role details.

Read Olivier Miossec's post explaining Jev's mental model: Jev outputs probabilities, not deterministic decisions, so when you use it with PowerShell for NSG rule filtering, Bicep what-if checks, or Azure Policy linting, interpret results probabilistically and adjust automation a

Attend Thomas Maurer's sessions at NVIDIA GTC Berlin to hear Microsoft's guidance on implementing Sovereign Cloud and Sovereign AI controls for managing data residency, compliance, and operational resilience.

AKS NAT Gateway Standardv2 is becoming the default, so review cluster egress/NAT settings and update any automation or firewall rules; the Azure Weekly Update (9 Oct 2026) also covers AKS bare metal on Ubuntu, AKS Anyscale, and App Service Java 8, 11, and 17.

Test multiple model sizes against your security evidence, reordered choices, reassuring text, and claims of authority: the author found bigger models were more stable but introduced other architectural trade-offs, so verify stability and behaviour before standardising on a size.

Do not assume VNet integration makes a resource private: during design reviews and audits explicitly verify public endpoints, inbound and outbound exposure, run pen tests, and lock down or remove public access where you need true privacy.

Hanselminutes video revisiting Michio Kaku's claim that Moore's Law effectively ended around 2020; there is no Azure product change announced, but review your hardware, thermal, and capacity planning assumptions for long-term performance scaling.

Treat prompts as non-deterministic artefacts: because the same prompt can produce different code, start versioning prompts, record model and prompt-engine specifics, and add reproducibility tests and CI checks rather than assuming prompts equal source code.

Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich discuss the new SemanticStart project and AI-assisted coding; to try it yourself, listen to the episode and clone the repo at https://github.com/markrussinovich/SemanticStart to explore semantic search for launching Windows apps, tools, and se

Client-driven compliance evaluation is now available for Windows devices in Intune: devices trigger a compliance check when they detect configuration changes instead of waiting for the next scheduled check-in, so expect faster compliance state updates and review your monitoring a

Watch John Savill's 'Tech in Five' on MCP to learn how MCP's capability discovery lets clients and target AI services declare and negotiate capabilities, so you can plan integrations and dependency decisions for your AI workloads.

Run this open-source, read-only analyser against your Power Platform or Dynamics 365 estate to produce a backlog with estimated remediation cost ranges, a named list of checks it could not run, and a check that verifies contact-centre conversation handoff to a person.

Avoid running live pentests or AI prompt tests in production: these can crash systems or cause prompt-injection data leaks, so conduct tests in isolated sandboxes or offline environments and implement prompt-injection mitigations and data exfiltration controls before any live tri

Apply Microsoft's six Responsible AI principles to your AI systems: review and update design, documentation, user disclosures, accountability assignments, testing, and incident response so chatbots and other models meet those responsibility expectations.

Microsoft announced three new Copilot capabilities,Home, Code, and Autopilot,rolling out gradually; check tenant availability, assess cost and governance impact, and plan admin and developer policy changes for Office and code-assistance integration when they reach your organisati

Steve Buchanan will be a panelist at the University of Minnesota's 3rd Annual ITI Technology Symposium on "How to AI-Proof Your Career", so if you want guidance on agentic AI and career impacts, attend the session or follow his posted materials.

Run the Azure CLI commands shown in the post to retrieve your Azure Log Analytics workspace keys, then supply those keys when configuring agents or integrations.

Public preview: GitHub Copilot Code Review is now available in Azure DevOps for Azure Repos, you can add Copilot as a reviewer on pull requests so it will analyse changed code, flag potential issues, and post comments directly in the PR.

No Azure action required: this Hanselminutes short quotes Michio Kaku saying children are most likely to get hooked on science between ages 10 and 16, provided as a community clip rather than a product or service update.

Intune's Endpoint Privilege Management documents EPM System Settings that let standard users change approved Windows network settings without local administrator rights; review and configure these EPM System Settings in Intune to grant only the specific network elevations you req

No new GA, preview, patch, or breaking change is announced in this Agent Security Update 2 post; it discusses agent vulnerabilities and operational observations, so audit your agent security configurations and await any specific remediation guidance from the author.

Roundup video summarises September 2026 AI model updates (Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 3.8 Flash, SpaceXAI Grok, OpenAI GPT-6 and 6.1); this is a community overview, not an official Azure release note, so consult vendor documentation for availability, API, or migration actions.

Two new Pluralsight courses were published: "Career Growth: Turning Work into Recognition" and "Career Growth: Making Your Impact Visible", they are now available for engineers who need practical guidance on communicating contributions and increasing visibility.

Deploy Microsoft Connected Cache (MCC) to cache Microsoft update and content delivery on-premises; follow this step-by-step tutorial to configure and deploy MCC in your infrastructure to increase download speed and reduce Internet bandwidth usage.

Enable the IgnoreWindowsUpdateGroupPolicies MDM setting in Intune to override Windows Update source selection and bypass on-device Group Policy/WSUS (MDMWinsOverGP does not apply), and apply this policy when migrating devices from GPO or WSUS to Intune.

Report: Microsoft published dates and prices for Azure capacity constraints in Europe (pricing change and availability guidance); review North Europe deployments now and prepare to shift workloads, buy reservations, or update failover regions to avoid limited capacity and higher

Do not treat AI model "high confidence" scores as an automated security control: treat probabilistic outputs as advisory and add deterministic checks, monitoring, human review, and logging before automating security decisions.

Retirement: Azure IoT Central and Microsoft HPC Pack are listed as retiring in this update, so plan and execute migrations or pick supported alternatives; the video also mentions VM Scale Sets automatic zone placement, so check the Azure docs for its availability and any migratio

No Azure action required: this Scott Hanselman video is a community discussion about many-worlds and Elvis, and does not introduce any changes to Azure services, SKUs, regions, or configurations you need to act on.

Typesafe.ai released Jev, a decision model you can run in cloud operations with PowerShell: feed context and a predefined question, and it returns a predefined answer with a probability (supports three question types), so evaluate it for deterministic decision workflows.

Preview: Microsoft Defender announced a public preview of the Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC) on 23 Sep 2026; if you run Defender XDR, create a test ISOC workspace to evaluate its SOC workflows and operational impact before wider deployment.

Follow this step-by-step guide to expose an Azure Function as an MCP tools endpoint via API Management and register it for use by a Copilot Studio agent, including configuration of routes and auth.

Community video discussion on agentic workflows with Peli de Halleux; informational content only, so there are no announced Azure product, region, or pricing changes and no immediate action required beyond watching for technical details.

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.

Do not treat "a human should check it" as an adequate security control for agentic or autonomous systems; update your threat models, approval gating, and auditing because MSRC's Low rating for a Security Copilot prompt injection relied on downstream human or automation approval,

Final post in the Windows 365 series explains using Windows 365 Link with Intune, so review and update your Intune device configuration and compliance policies to ensure Cloud PC linking and management work as intended.

Microsoft Intune service release 2609 (September 2026) adds new Android Enterprise capabilities; review the official Intune 2609 release notes, test policy and app configurations on representative devices, and stage deployment before broad rollout.

Watch the Cybersecurity Mittendrin episode on Microsoft Purview to learn concrete controls and configurations for protecting enterprise data and AI prompts, and use the episode's GitHub links for hands-on workshops and artefacts.