Introducing Budget Bytes: Build powerful AI apps for under $25

By Dustin Ward

When developers hear “cloud” and “AI,” their first thought is often about cost. “How much will this cost me to learn? Can I build something meaningful without racking up a surprise bill?” Budget Bytes is a new series is designed to inspire developers to build affordable, production-quality AI applications on Azure with a budget of…

Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry-Frontier Performance for Scale

By Dustin Ward

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available today in Microsoft Foundry, and it is designed for teams who want frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work at scale.Last week, we took a major step forward with the availability of Claude Opus 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry, bringing frontier AI capable of deep reasoning, agentic workflows, and complex…

Agentic cloud operations: A new way to run the cloud

By Dustin Ward

Cloud operations have reached an inflection point. For more than a decade, the industry has focused on scale—more infrastructure, more data, more services, more dashboards to build and manage both infrastructure and applications. While today’s cloud delivers extraordinary flexibility, the rapid growth of modern applications and AI workloads has introduced levels of scale and complexity…

Five Reasons to attend SQLCon

By Dustin Ward

The SQL community is gathering in Atlanta this March for the first‑ever SQLCon, co‑located with FabCon, the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, March 16-20. One registration unlocks both events, giving you access to deep SQL expertise and the latest in Fabric, Power BI, data engineering, real‑time intelligence, and AI. Whether you’re a DBA, developer, data engineer,…