187 posts tagged with "Azure"

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools. The architecture is straightforward: Developers can expose their data through MCP servers or build AI applications (MCP clients) that connect to these servers.

There are different types of primitives that an MCP server can expose, which extend the ability of your AI applications and clients to create, read: Resources are a core primitive in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that allows servers to expose data and content that clients can read and use as context for LLM interactions. Prompts enable servers to define reusable prompt templates and workflows that clients can quickly surface to users and LLMs. They provide a powerful way to standardize and share everyday LLM interactions. Tools are a powerful primitive in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that enable servers to expose executable functionality to clients. Through tools, LLMs can interact with external systems, perform computations, and take actions in the real world.

In our demo, the client will be Visual Studio Code. The client connects to an MCP server over HTTPS to call the document search tool. This tool retrieves the same content available to services like Copilot for Azure from the Microsoft Learn semantic search index. By using this index, responses can be better grounded in current documentation. For example, grounded results will surface that Azure Active Directory is now called Microsoft Entra ID and indicate which services are generally available within a specific region, based on the returned source content.

Drasi (named after the Greek word for 'Action') is a change data processing platform that automates real-time detection, evaluation, and meaningful reaction to events in complex, event-driven systems, created as part of the Azure Incubation Teams, Drasi was accepted in to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, at the Sandbox Maturity level in January of 2025.

I was fortunate enough to witness a demo of this in action and wondered how I might learn to use Drasi with something I am familiar with - the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. The Azure Role Assignment Monitor with Drasi was born.

Reliability (Resiliency, availability, recovery) is part of one of the main pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework. It is essential for ensuring that applications and services remain operational and performant, even in the face of failures or unexpected events. Reliability encompasses various aspects, including fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and high availability.

Reliability is also a shared responsibility between the cloud provider (ie, Microsoft) and the customer. While Azure provides a robust infrastructure and services designed for reliability, customers must also implement best practices and strategies to ensure their applications are resilient and can recover from failures.

But a key question arises: How do we check the reliability (in this example, Zone redundancy of our Workload) ?

One of the tools we can use for this is the az zones command line tool.

Announced at Microsoft Build 2025, Planned maintenance is now generally available in Azure Container Apps. This feature allows you to control when non-critical updates are applied to your Container Apps environment to minimize downtime and impact to applications. Non-critical updates include minor security patches, bug fixes, and new releases.

The other day, I wrote an article about Deploy & Test KAITO on AKS with Visual Studio Code. One of the areas I showcased was testing the completion of the KAITO model within Visual Studio Code; however, I didn't touch on how to use the completion endpoint directly.