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
Manage agents, models, and tools — control-plane overview for governing projects, assets, deployments, and shared resources

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
What's new in Microsoft Foundry | Build Edition — Build 2026 roundup covering hosted runtimes, Toolboxes, memory, Voice Live, Foundry IQ, and Agent Optimizer (Jun 2, 2026)
Build and run agents at scale with Microsoft Foundry at Build 2026 — production agent updates across Agent Framework, hosted agents, Microsoft 365 distribution, observability, and optimization (Jun 2, 2026)
Introducing Agent Optimizer in Foundry Agent Service — private preview for evaluating hosted agents and generating improved instructions, skills, tool descriptions, and model choices (Jun 3, 2026)
Making agent memory more reliable, transparent, and production-ready — procedural memory, management experiences, and time-to-live controls for production agents (Jun 3, 2026)
Discovery to Execution: Scaling Agents with Toolboxes and Routines — new Toolboxes capabilities and Routines preview for discovering, managing, securing, and executing agent tools at scale (Jun 3, 2026)
From Building Agents to Working with Them: Enterprise Agent Distribution in Microsoft Foundry — publish Foundry agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, and govern distribution through Agent 365 (Jun 2, 2026)
Build smarter document workflows: What's new in Azure Content Understanding at Build 2026 — multimodal content extraction updates for document, audio, image, and video workflows in Foundry Tools (Jun 2, 2026)
Cross-region model connectivity options in Microsoft Foundry: supported patterns — architecture guidance for connecting Foundry projects to models and Agent Service capabilities in other regions (Jun 19, 2026)
Auto-generated rubric evaluators: Building context-aware evaluators for AI agents — task-specific evaluator generation for measuring agent quality against context-aware rubrics (Jun 18, 2026)
How to score a user simulator: Introducing USR-8 — evaluation guidance for judging user simulators used in agent testing (Jun 17, 2026)
Build an automated SLA risk agent with Routines in Microsoft Foundry — scheduled, repeatable agent process grounded in Foundry IQ (Jun 17, 2026)
Benchmarks in Microsoft Foundry (preview) — standardized model and agent quality checks for repeatable evaluation workflows (Jun 15, 2026)
Foundry Agent Service is GA — private networking, Voice Live, and enterprise evaluations
Introducing Microsoft Agent Framework — the open-source engine for agentic AI apps
What's new in Microsoft Foundry | March 2026 — Foundry Agent Service GA, GPT-5.4, SDK 2.0 GA across Python/JS/Java/.NET, Fireworks AI and NVIDIA Nemotron models
What's new in Foundry Labs | April 2026 — MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2 now available as an end-to-end audio and visual AI stack
Bring Your Own Model to Foundry Agent Service is now Generally Available — route model requests through your own gateway for compliance/governance while building agentic services (Apr 27, 2026)
OrganAIze — What happens when you let AI agents organize themselves? — experiment with self-organizing multi-agent systems that determine their own structure and workflow optimization (Apr 28, 2026)
Voice Live API now supports WebRTC (Preview) — real-time, low-latency voice interactions for agentic applications (Apr 30, 2026)
Prompt Flow is being retired — Microsoft Foundry retirement notice and migration guidance for existing Prompt Flow customers (Apr 30, 2026)
Introducing DeepSeek V4-Flash and V4-Pro in Microsoft Foundry — new DeepSeek V4 family available in the Foundry model catalog (May 1, 2026)
What's new in Azure Language in Foundry Tools — updates for language tools in Foundry, including sensitive information detection and protection scenarios (May 29, 2026)
GPT Realtime in production: Which context strategy should you actually use? — practical guidance for production Azure GPT Realtime context-window strategies (May 29, 2026)
Migrating to GPT-5.x without breaking GPT-4: A practical backward-compatible playbook — migration guidance for handling API and parameter differences when moving from GPT-4 to GPT-5.x models (May 29, 2026)
AI Observability Starter Kit for Microsoft Foundry Agents — starter guidance for moving from green dashboards to production-grade AI observability (May 29, 2026)
Load testing hosted MCP servers with Locust and Azure Load Testing — patterns for testing bursty, long-running agent tool traffic against hosted MCP servers (May 29, 2026)
Extending the Vercel AI SDK to Microsoft Foundry: TypeScript — provider integration patterns for building Foundry-backed agentic apps with the Vercel AI SDK (May 28, 2026)
Claude Opus 4.8 is now available in Microsoft Foundry — new Claude model option for complex, long-running, tool-using workflows in Foundry (May 28, 2026)
Deploying existing agentic services to Microsoft 365 Copilot via gateway and OBO access — guidance for exposing existing agentic services to Microsoft 365 Copilot with delegated on-behalf-of access (May 25, 2026)
Monitoring & Observability in Microsoft Foundry — guidance for tracking production agent behavior, quality, latency, and operational drift in Microsoft Foundry (May 22, 2026)
Foundry IQ as a shared knowledge brain for multiple AI agents — patterns for using Foundry IQ as a common retrieval and knowledge layer across multi-agent systems (May 22, 2026)
When AI should ask for help: Human-in-the-loop patterns in Microsoft Foundry — patterns for adaptive agentic systems that know when to defer to a human reviewer (May 21, 2026)
Teaching AI to remember: Exploring Memory Store in Microsoft Foundry — how the new Memory Store gives agents persistent, structured memory across sessions (May 21, 2026)
What's new in Microsoft Foundry Labs – May 2026 — agent-interaction benchmark, experimental end-to-end agentic stack, a faster image model, and a first-party geospatial model (May 21, 2026)
Cohere Command A+ now available in Microsoft Foundry — Cohere's new mixture-of-experts model for enterprise agentic workloads, available under Apache 2.0 (May 21, 2026)
Securing Azure AI applications against prompt injection – Part 2 — defense-in-depth strategies for GenAI threats that traditional security models miss (May 21, 2026)
Now in Foundry: Tongyi-MAI Z-Image-Turbo with FLUX.1-Schnell and SDXL Base 1.0 — Model Mondays roundup of three Hugging Face image models added to Foundry (May 18, 2026)
"Not available in your region" isn't a dead end: A security assessment of Global Deployments in Microsoft Foundry — security and compliance guidance for using Global Standard deployments when a model is not regionally available (May 18, 2026)
Designing AI-driven observability for trustworthy agentic AI systems — patterns for catching runaway agent loops and costs before they reach production (May 15, 2026)
Building an AI-powered contract price adjustment agent with Docusign MCP and Microsoft Foundry — implementation walkthrough for MCP-connected contract workflows with Foundry agents (May 14, 2026)
Open model inference at scale on Foundry: What's new with Fireworks AI — Fireworks AI updates for best-in-class open model inference directly in Microsoft Foundry (May 14, 2026)
How to run evals for the model router — Foundry DevBlog walkthrough of quality, cost, and latency evaluation pipelines for the model router (May 19, 2026)
What's new in Microsoft Foundry | April 2026 — GPT-5.5, GPT-image-2, MAI first-party models, Gemma 4, Claude Opus 4.7, Foundry Local GA, Agent Framework 1.0 GA, and Foundry Toolkit for VS Code GA (May 12, 2026)
Introducing Toolboxes in Foundry — curate, configure, and reuse tools across all agents from a single managed endpoint (preview) (Apr 22, 2026)
From Local to Production: The Complete Developer Journey for Building, Composing, and Deploying AI Agents — Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 GA, Foundry Toolkit for VS Code GA, memory, Toolbox, and hosted agents (Apr 22, 2026)
Introducing the new hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service — secure, scalable compute built for agents (preview) (Apr 22, 2026)
What's new in Microsoft Foundry | May 2026 — Build 2026 announcements, new MAI models, Agent Framework updates, and Foundry IQ GA
Hybrid AI Agents in Python: Routing between Foundry Local and Microsoft Foundry — patterns for building agents that dynamically route between local and cloud inference (May 27, 2026)

Microsoft Build 2026

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

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 Microsoft Foundry Agent Service? — overview of Prompt agents and Hosted agents, their differences, and when to use each
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
Build and run agents at scale with Microsoft Foundry at Build 2026 — hosted agents, Agent Framework, Toolboxes, distribution to Microsoft 365, observability, and optimization
Scaling agents with Toolboxes and Routines — managed tool discovery, access, and execution patterns for production-grade agents
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 product page — capabilities overview, pricing, and getting started
Introducing hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service — secure, scalable compute with VM-level sandboxes, persistent file systems, and framework-agnostic runtime (preview)
Introducing Toolboxes in Foundry — curate, configure, and reuse tools across all your agents through a unified endpoint (preview)

Prompt Flow migration

Prompt Flow is being retired — official retirement notice and migration guidance for existing Prompt Flow customers
What is Microsoft Foundry Agent Service? — recommended successor path for new production agent workloads

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 is now Generally Available — cross-platform on-device AI for Windows, macOS, Android with SDKs for Python, JS, C#, and Rust
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
From Local to Production: the complete developer journey for AI agents — Agent Framework v1.0, Foundry Toolkit for VS Code GA, memory, Toolbox, and observability

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
How to run evals for the model router — official Foundry DevBlog walkthrough for measuring quality, cost, and latency when routing across models
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

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
Agent Optimizer in Foundry Agent Service — automate the evaluate-generate-rank-deploy improvement loop for hosted agents

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 Microsoft Foundry Fine-Tuning | April 2026 — Global Training for o4-mini across 12+ regions, new GPT-4.1 model graders, and an RFT best-practices guide

Fine-tuning samples and repos

microsoft-foundry/fine-tuning — official repo with 12 end-to-end fine-tuning demos and sample datasets
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

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

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-foundry/build-2026-demos — official Build 2026 demos for hosted agents, memory, Toolboxes, Voice Live, and evaluation
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