9 min read
Content Understanding vs Document Intelligence: Choose by Shape
Document Intelligence wins on fixed layouts, Content Understanding on variable or multimodal input: split the pipeline and leave stable extractors alone.
Microsoft Foundry
22 articles
9 min read
Foundry Routines Are GA: Scheduled Agents Without Building a Scheduler
Foundry routines run an agent on a timer, a schedule or a GitHub or Teams event. When to use them, when to use a workflow, and guardrails for unattended runs.
9 min read
Egress Policy Belongs on the Agent, Not in Its Code
Foundry's preview egress controls attach ordered destination rules to a hosted agent. Why that limits prompt-injection damage, and how to roll it out safely.
8 min read
GPT-6 Landed in Foundry: Upgrade Discipline Beats Upgrade Speed
GPT-6 arrived in Foundry ten weeks after GPT-5.6. Pin versions, gate on real queries, shadow traffic and plan retirements before you switch tiers on day one.
9 min read
Claude's Server-Side Tools in Foundry: What to Let the Provider Run
Claude hosted on Azure in Foundry now runs web fetch, web search, tool search and an MCP connector for you. Decide which belong behind your own gateway.
9 min read
Foundry Hosted Agents Are GA: When to Stop Running Your Own Containers
Hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service are GA. How they compare with Agent Framework on Container Apps or AKS on identity, networking, cold starts and tracing.
9 min read
Model Router Already Routes to Claude and Open Models: Govern the Pool
Foundry Model Router picks from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, xAI and Meta models. Treat subsets, policy and model logging as governance, not tuning knobs.
9 min read
GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra or Luna: Pick the Tier per Job, Not per App
GPT-5.6 in Foundry has a 5x price spread across Sol, Terra and Luna. Choose a tier for each workflow step, back it with eval gates, then pick deployment types.
7 min read
Output Contracts: Catch a Model Swap Before Downstream Systems Do
Structured outputs fix the shape of a model's answer, not its meaning: a two-layer contract between a Foundry model and the systems that consume it.
8 min read
Canary a Model Swap in Foundry: Sticky Splits and Version Stamps
An offline evaluation can't tell you how a new model handles real traffic. How I'd canary a Foundry model change with sticky splits and per-call version logs.
7 min read
Raising Groundedness Without Guesswork: Label the Failures First
Once retrieval is ruled out, ungrounded answers fall into a few repeatable patterns: label them, fix one at a time and track completeness too.
8 min read
Foundry Agent Versions as Releases: Git, Evals and Publishing
How I'd run Microsoft Foundry agent changes like releases in April 2026: definitions in Git, versions from CI, evaluation gates and Agent Application promotion.
9 min read
Model Retirements in Foundry: Choose the Upgrade Policy on Purpose
Every Foundry model deployment has a version upgrade policy, and the default swaps your model at retirement. How to choose, audit and run model changes safely.
8 min read
Quality SLOs for LLM Features: An Error Budget for Bad Answers
Treat answer quality like availability: define a good answer, agree a target with the product owner, and let the error budget decide when changes stop.
9 min read
Foundry After the March GA: What's Governed and What's Still Preview
Foundry Agent Service went GA in mid-March 2026, but monitoring and tracing are still preview. What's governed now, and the controls I'd add first.
8 min read
Gating LLM Changes on Groundedness Flips, Not Fluency Averages
How I compare a baseline and a candidate prompt or model on frozen context, count groundedness regressions per row, and treat fluency as a tie-breaker.
8 min read
Foundry Project Boundaries: Draw Them Around Use Cases, Not Demos
How I split Microsoft Foundry resources and projects by environment and use case so RBAC, quota and agent data line up with ownership and delivery speeds up.
9 min read
Azure AI Foundry Is Now Microsoft Foundry: Hubs, Projects, Choices
What the Microsoft Foundry rename means in early 2026: Foundry projects vs hubs, the preview portal, prompt flow's place, and how I'd decide.
8 min read
Fine-Tuning or RAG? Decide by the Failure You're Fixing
Fine-tuning and RAG fix different failures. How to tell which one you have on Microsoft Foundry in early 2026, what each costs, and when to combine them.
8 min read
Azure OpenAI vs OpenAI in 2026: Same Code, Different Contract
With the Azure OpenAI v1 API one OpenAI client works on both, so the choice rests on data processing location, identity, networking, capacity and model timing.
8 min read
Azure OpenAI Hidden Costs: What Your Token Estimate Misses
Re-sent history, hidden reasoning tokens, billed failures, idle fine-tuned deployments and re-embedding: where Azure OpenAI bills drift from the estimate.
9 min read
AI Agents in 2026: Where They Earn Their Keep and Where They Don't
A practitioner's reality check on AI agents going into 2026: the use cases that work, where they break, and how to pick a framework without the hype.