New options for AI-powered innovation, resiliency, and control with Microsoft Azure

By Dustin Ward

Organizations running mission‑critical workloads operate under stricter standards because system failures can often affect people and business operations at scale. They must ensure control, resilience, and operational autonomy such that innovation does not compromise governance. They need agility that also maintains continuity and preserves standards compliance, so they can get the most out of AI,…

Introducing Mistral Large 3 in Microsoft Foundry: Open, capable, and ready for production workloads

By Dustin Ward

Enterprises today are embracing open-weight models for their transparency, flexibility, and ability to run across a broad range of deployment architectures. As the number of open models grows, the bar for reliability, instruction-following quality, multimodal reasoning, and long-context performance continues to rise.  Today, we’re excited to announce that Mistral Large 3 is now available in Azure, bringing one of the…

A decade of open innovation: Celebrating 10 years of Microsoft and Red Hat partnership

By Dustin Ward

Ten years ago, Microsoft and Red Hat began a partnership grounded in open source and enterprise cloud innovation. This year, we celebrate a decade of collaboration. Our journey together has helped customers accelerate hybrid cloud transformation, empower developers to innovate, and strengthen the open source community to drive modern application innovation​. Accelerate modernization with Azure…

Azure networking updates on security, reliability, and high availability

By Dustin Ward

Enabling the next wave of cloud transformation with Azure Networking The cloud landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driven by the exponential growth of AI workloads and the need for seamless, secure, and high-performance connectivity. Azure Network services stand at the forefront of this transformation, delivering the hyperscale infrastructure, intelligent services, and resilient architecture…

Introducing Claude Opus 4.5 in Microsoft Foundry

By Dustin Ward

We’re at a real inflection point in the AI landscape, a threshold where models move from useful assistants to genuine collaborators. Models that understand the objective, factor in constraints, and execute complex multi-tool workflows. Models that not only support processes, but help restructure them for reliability, scale, and operational efficiency. Anthropic’s newest model, Claude Opus…

Microsoft Foundry: Scale innovation on a modular, interoperable, and secure agent stack

By Dustin Ward

One year ago, at Microsoft Ignite, we set out to redefine enterprise intelligence with Foundry. Our conviction was clear: software would evolve beyond rigid workflows, becoming systems that reason, adapt, and act with purpose. We envisioned developers moving from prescriptive logic to shaping intelligent behavior. Today, that transformation is accelerating across industries and organizations of…