New Azure Cobalt 200 VMs deliver 50% performance improvement, fully optimized for modern agentic AI workloads

By Dustin Ward

In this article Building on the success of Cobalt 100 VMs What’s new in Cobalt 200 Arm-based VMs Industry partners and customer adoption Developer ecosystem and Arm compatibility Microsoft services powered by Cobalt 200 VMs VM families and specifications The next chapter in Azure’s custom silicon journey Additional resources As organizations increasingly embrace the agentic…

Powering multi-cluster workloads with seamless cross‑cluster networking for Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager

By Dustin Ward

In this article The challenge of multi-cluster networking Our vision: Multi-cluster management with seamless networking Strategic resilience with cross-cluster networking Getting started with cross-cluster networking Documentation and resources As organizations modernize their application portfolios, we are witnessing a fundamental shift in how cloud-native infrastructure is architected. No longer is the question “How do we scale…

Azure IaaS: Deploy high-performance workloads with a system-level approach

By Dustin Ward

In this article Rethinking performance in the cloud Accelerating AI workloads with system-level performance Scaling cloud-native applications without sacrificing performance Sustaining performance for business-critical systems Performance as a coordinated system Practical guidance: Optimizing for your workload Build on a foundation designed for performance This blog post is the third part of a blog series called Azure…

Scaling cloud and AI: Microsoft Azure’s commitment to Europe’s digital future

By Dustin Ward

Customer demand for cloud and AI is accelerating worldwide, and this demand has been particularly strong in Europe. Public sector customers like Manchester City Council are using Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline operations and improve citizen services, while companies like Inriver use Microsoft Foundry to transform product information management. These innovations are powered by Microsoft…

Azure IaaS: Defense in depth built on secure-by-design principles

By Dustin Ward

In this article Defense in depth as a system Secure by design: Engineering security into the platform Hardware and host-level trust Virtual machine-layer trust Secure by default: Protection enabled without friction Secure defaults across networking Encryption and data protection by default Compute protection defaults Secure in operation: Continuous protection at runtime Monitoring, detection, and signal…