Microsoft Foundry Resources

What is Microsoft Foundry?

• What is Microsoft Foundry? — overview and core concepts
• Documentation hub — learn.microsoft.com/azure/ai-foundry
• Microsoft Foundry portal — ai.azure.com
• Quickstart: Get started in the Foundry playground
• Create your first project in Microsoft Foundry

Key concepts

• Hubs — top-level governance containers shared across teams and projects
• Projects — workspaces where teams build, evaluate, and deploy AI apps
• Connections — secure links to models, data sources, and services
• Deployments — hosted model endpoints for production inference
• Microsoft Foundry architecture — how hubs, projects, and resources relate

Platform overview

• Microsoft Foundry: An End-to-End Platform for Building, Governing, and Scaling AI — comprehensive overview of the unified platform experience
• Accelerating Enterprise AI with Microsoft Foundry — enterprise adoption patterns and platform capabilities

• Azure AI Blog — latest posts and announcements
• Microsoft Foundry Blog — devblogs.microsoft.com/foundry
• What's New in Microsoft Foundry — monthly feature roundups on DevBlogs
• What's new in Microsoft Foundry — release notes and changelog
• What's new in Azure OpenAI Service — model and feature releases
• Microsoft AI Blog — platform strategy and announcements
• Foundry Agent Service is GA — private networking, Voice Live, and enterprise evaluations
• Introducing Microsoft Agent Framework — the open-source engine for agentic AI apps

Microsoft Build 2025

• BRK Intelligent Apps with Azure AI Foundry
• BRK Azure AI Agent Service: Build production AI agents

Microsoft Ignite 2025

• BRK189 AI agents in Microsoft Foundry: ship fast, scale fearlessly
• BRK1706 Build & Manage AI Apps with Your Agent Factory
• BRK191 From Code to Real Results: AI Impact with Azure AI Foundry Models

Microsoft Ignite 2024

• KEY01 Opening Keynote
• BRK102 Azure AI Foundry: Build the next generation of AI apps

Cloud Adoption Framework

• AI adoption scenario in the Cloud Adoption Framework — strategy, plan, ready, adopt, govern, manage
• Microsoft Foundry landing zone accelerator — reference implementation for enterprise deployments
• Plan for AI adoption — organizational readiness and AI strategy
• Prepare your Azure environment for AI workloads

Adoption guidance

• Responsible use of AI in Microsoft Foundry — principles and practices for responsible AI adoption
• Responsible AI overview for Azure AI Services
• Microsoft Responsible AI — company-wide principles and tools

Microsoft Learn paths

• Build AI apps with Microsoft Foundry — end-to-end learning path
• Develop AI solutions with Azure OpenAI Service
• Apply prompt engineering with Azure OpenAI Service
• Develop AI agents with Azure OpenAI and Semantic Kernel
• Browse all Azure AI & ML learning paths

Applied Skills & labs

• Develop generative AI solutions with Azure OpenAI Service — Applied Skills credential
• Build a natural language processing solution with Azure AI Language — Applied Skills credential
• Intermediate Azure AI hands-on labs

Videos

• Azure AI Foundry Overview — John Savill's deep-dive walkthrough covering models, SDKs, deployment, and safety
• Get Started with Generative AI — John Savill's playlist covering Foundry, RAG, orchestration, and Copilot

Workshops

• Build your code-first agent with Azure AI Foundry — 75-minute interactive self-guided workshop
• Azure/ai-foundry-workshop — 4–5 hour hands-on workshop with notebooks, agent examples, and e2e project
• microsoft/agentic-ai-lab — end-to-end lab covering agent frameworks, RAG, red-teaming, evaluation, and responsible AI
• microsoft-foundry/ai-tutorials — step-by-step tutorials for multimodal models, prompt engineering, and agents

Certifications

• AI-102: Azure AI Engineer Associate — designing and implementing Azure AI solutions
• DP-100: Azure Data Scientist Associate — machine learning solutions on Azure
• AI-900: Azure AI Fundamentals — foundational AI and ML concepts on Azure

Azure AI Agent Service

• What is Azure AI Agent Service? — build production AI agents with tools and memory
• Quickstart: Create your first AI agent
• Agent tools overview — code interpreter, file search, function calling, Bing grounding
• Foundry Agent Service GA announcement — private networking, Voice Live, and enterprise-grade evaluations
• Announcing GA of Azure AI Foundry Agent Service — Tech Community deep-dive on multi-agent orchestration, BYO VNet, and 1,400+ connectors
• Foundry Agent Service at Ignite 2025 — simple to build, powerful to deploy, trusted to operate
• Foundry Agent Service product page — capabilities overview, pricing, and getting started

Prompt Flow

• Prompt Flow in Microsoft Foundry — build and iterate on LLM-based flows
• Prompt Flow documentation — open-source SDK and tooling
• microsoft/promptflow — GitHub repository

Agent tutorials and guides

• Step-by-step tutorial: Building an AI agent using Azure AI Foundry — portal walkthrough from project setup to testing
• A Developer's Guide to Azure AI Agents — The New Stack overview of Agent Service SDKs, multi-agent orchestration, and debugging
• Azure-Samples/get-started-with-ai-agents — starter template with file search, citations, and built-in monitoring

Foundry Local (on-device inference)

• Foundry Local: A New Era of Edge AI — official DevBlog on the ONNX-based on-device runtime for SLMs
• Foundry Local overview — documentation for running AI models locally on Windows, macOS, and Linux
• Running SLMs locally using Azure AI Foundry Local — Clemens Siebler's hands-on walkthrough
• Local model serving — Using Foundry Local — Ravikanth Chaganti on CLI setup, model management, and REST API usage

Foundry SDK & development tools

• Microsoft Foundry SDK overview — Python, JavaScript, and .NET
• Tracing and observability for AI apps — distributed tracing in Foundry
• Tutorial: Build a RAG app with the Foundry SDK
• Microsoft Foundry VS Code extension
• Use LangChain with Microsoft Foundry
• Use Semantic Kernel with Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft Agent Framework

• Microsoft Agent Framework documentation — unified open-source SDK merging Semantic Kernel and AutoGen for building multi-agent systems
• microsoft/agent-framework — GitHub repository with Python and .NET samples
• Introducing Microsoft Agent Framework — Foundry DevBlog announcement
• Build a real-world example with Agent Framework, Foundry, MCP, and Aspire — end-to-end production app walkthrough

Ignite 2025

• BRK201 AI builder's guide to agent development in Foundry Agent Service
• BRK192 AI tools for agents in Azure AI Foundry: Plug, play and reach
• BRK197 AI-Powered Automation & Multi-Agent Orchestration in Azure AI Foundry
• BRK203 Building autonomous enterprise agents with reasoning
• LAB512 Prototyping multimodal agents with Azure AI Foundry and the AI Toolkit

Model catalog

• Model catalog overview — browse and compare hundreds of models from Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Mistral, and more
• Model benchmarks — compare quality and performance metrics across models
• Serverless API deployments (MaaS) — pay-per-token, no managed infrastructure
• Managed compute deployments (MaaP) — dedicated compute with full control

Model Router

• How to use Model Router for Microsoft Foundry — single endpoint that dynamically selects the best LLM per request
• Model Router in Microsoft Foundry: Intelligent Model Selection — Nanddeep Nachan's walkthrough of routing modes and deployment
• Azure AI Model Router: Implementation and Production Patterns — Coding with Ramin; real-world patterns and gotchas

Azure OpenAI Service

• Azure OpenAI Service overview — GPT-4o, o-series, DALL-E, Whisper, embeddings
• Azure OpenAI model reference — all available models and versions
• What's new in Azure OpenAI — latest model releases and features
• Quotas, limits, and regional availability

Azure AI Services

• Azure AI Services documentation hub — vision, speech, language, document intelligence, search
• Azure AI Vision — image analysis, OCR, face detection
• Azure AI Speech — speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation
• Azure AI Language — NLP, sentiment, entity recognition, summarization
• Azure AI Search — vector and hybrid search for RAG patterns

Ignite 2025

• BRK191 From Code to Real Results: AI Impact with Azure AI Foundry Models
• BRK195 Making Smarter Model Choices in Azure AI Foundry
• BRK196 Foundry IQ: the future of RAG with knowledge retrieval and AI Search

Evaluations

• Evaluate your generative AI app in Microsoft Foundry — built-in and custom evaluators
• Azure AI Evaluation SDK — run evaluations in code without the portal
• Built-in evaluation metrics — groundedness, relevance, coherence, fluency, similarity
• Monitor deployed models — track quality, latency, and token usage in production

Fine-tuning: overview and when to use

• Fine-tune Azure OpenAI models — customize GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, and more
• Fine-tuning overview — when to use fine-tuning vs. prompt engineering vs. RAG
• Fine-tuning considerations — trade-offs, data requirements, cost, and latency guidance
• Fine-tune Meta Llama models in Microsoft Foundry
• Fine-tune Phi-3 models in Microsoft Foundry

Advanced fine-tuning techniques

• Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) — train with custom verifiers and reward signals; generally available with o4-mini
• Model distillation — transfer reasoning from a large teacher model into a smaller, faster student model
• Stored completions — capture production outputs for distillation and evaluation datasets
• Synthetic data generation for fine-tuning — generate and curate training data with AI assistance

Fine-tuning videos and training

• Model Mondays S2E05: Fine Tuning & Distillation — end-to-end demo covering fine-tuning and distillation in Microsoft Foundry
• Make Azure AI Real: Fine-tuning and customizing generative AI apps — live demo walkthrough with Korey Stegared-Pace and Nitya Narasimhan
• Microsoft Learn module: Fine-tune an Azure OpenAI model

Fine-tuning blogs

• Beyond the Prompt: why and how to fine-tune your own models — Radhika Bollineni; when SFT makes sense over prompt engineering
• The Developer's Guide to Smarter Fine-tuning — SFT, RFT, and distillation compared with practical guidance
• DPO fine-tuning using the Microsoft Foundry SDK — Direct Preference Optimization for aligning models with human preferences
• Fine-tuning GPT-4o for image classification — vision fine-tuning walkthrough on Microsoft Foundry
• o4-mini RFT now generally available — GA announcement; custom Python graders, trains from as few as 100 samples
• Distillation: turning smaller models into high-performance solutions — knowledge distillation deep-dive
• Enterprise best practices for fine-tuning Azure OpenAI models — hub/spoke architecture for secure, compliant fine-tuning pipelines
• What's new in Azure AI Foundry fine-tuning (Build 2025) — RFT with o4-mini, global training, and developer evaluation tier

Fine-tuning samples and repos

• microsoft-foundry/fine-tuning — official repo with 12 end-to-end fine-tuning demos and sample datasets
• Build 2025 LAB329: distillation with DeepSeek V3 and Phi-4 mini — hands-on lab using Foundry Local
• RAFT: Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning sample — UC Berkeley Gorilla RAFT method; synthetic datasets + fine-tune Llama or GPT-4o
• LLM Fine-Tuning on Azure — beginner-to-expert guide for GPT models and open-source LLMs/SLMs on Azure

Evaluation blogs

• Evaluating and optimizing custom RAG agents using Azure AI Foundry — RAG triad metrics (retrieval, groundedness, relevance) and best practices

Content safety and responsible AI

• Content filtering in Azure OpenAI — default and configurable safety layers
• Azure AI Content Safety — detect harmful content across text and images
• Responsible AI tools in Microsoft Foundry — safety evaluations, red-teaming, dashboards

Ignite 2025

• BRK188 AI fine-tuning in Azure AI Foundry to make your agents unstoppable
• BRK190 Monitor, optimize and scale with AI Observability
• BRK202 Building Responsible AI Agents with Azure AI Foundry
• LAB516 Safeguard your agents with AI Red Teaming Agent in Azure AI Foundry

Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

• AI adoption scenario — strategy, planning, readiness, governance, and management for AI at scale
• Microsoft Foundry landing zone accelerator — enterprise-ready reference implementation
• Prepare your landing zone for AI workloads
• Govern AI workloads — policies, controls, and compliance for AI in the enterprise

Well-Architected Framework (WAF)

• AI workloads on Azure — WAF guidance for reliability, security, cost, performance, and operations
• Get started with AI workload design
• Security for AI workloads — WAF security pillar applied to AI

Reference architectures

• RAG baseline architecture with Microsoft Foundry — production-ready retrieval-augmented generation
• Azure Architecture Center: AI + Machine Learning — patterns, guides, and reference architectures
• Baseline OpenAI end-to-end chat architecture

Security and networking

• Configure private link for Microsoft Foundry — network isolation with private endpoints
• Role-based access control in Microsoft Foundry — built-in roles and custom role assignments
• Secure your Microsoft Foundry hub — managed virtual networks and outbound rules
• Use managed identity with Azure OpenAI — keyless authentication best practice

Ignite 2025

• BRK205 AI Operations in Azure AI Foundry: Own the Fleet, Master the Mission
• BRK212 Trustworthy AI at Microsoft: From Commitments to Capabilities

Featured case studies

• Accenture: Responsible AI at scale with Azure AI Foundry — 75+ use cases, 16 in production, 50% reduction in AI app build time

Browse by industry

• Customer stories: Microsoft Foundry — browse published case studies
• Financial services AI stories — banking, insurance, and capital markets
• Healthcare AI stories — clinical, administrative, and patient-facing AI
• Retail and consumer goods AI stories
• All Azure customer stories

Official sample repositories

• microsoft-foundry/foundry-samples — official docs samples, notebooks, and end-to-end examples
• azure-samples/azureai-samples — official Microsoft Foundry sample collection
• azure-samples/azure-ai-agent-service-toolkit — Azure AI Agent Service starter kit
• Azure-Samples/get-started-with-ai-agents — agent starter template with file search, citations, and monitoring
• azure/openai-samples — Azure OpenAI code samples
• microsoft/promptflow — examples — Prompt Flow sample flows
• azure-samples/rag-postgres-openai-python — RAG with PostgreSQL and Azure OpenAI
• azure-samples/azure-search-openai-demo — ChatGPT + Azure AI Search reference app
• microsoft-foundry/fine-tuning — 12 end-to-end fine-tuning demos and sample datasets

Workshops and labs

• Azure/ai-foundry-workshop — 4–5 hour hands-on workshop with notebooks and end-to-end project
• microsoft/agentic-ai-lab — end-to-end lab covering agents, RAG, red-teaming, and evaluation
• microsoft-foundry/ai-tutorials — self-contained tutorials for multimodal models, prompts, and agents
• MicrosoftLearning/mslearn-ai-studio — practical exercises for Microsoft Foundry training modules

Solution accelerators

• Azure AI templates — production-ready starter templates from the Foundry portal
• azure/ai-app-templates — AI application scaffolding templates

• Azure AI Tech Community — latest blog posts and discussions
• Azure AI Services blog — product announcements and how-tos from the team
• Microsoft Foundry GitHub Discussions — ask questions and share ideas
• Microsoft Foundry feedback — vote on feature requests and report issues
• Stack Overflow: azure-ai-studio — community Q&A
• Azure OpenAI support — service limits, quotas, and support channels
• Microsoft Foundry GitHub Discussions (developer forum) — Q&A, polls, and project showcases
• Microsoft Foundry DevBlog — engineering blog with tutorials, announcements, and deep dives
• Microsoft Agent Framework team blog — official updates, roadmaps, and technical articles