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…

Claude Opus 4.8 is now available in Microsoft Foundry

By Dustin Ward

Claude Opus 4.8 is now available in Microsoft Foundry, giving developers and enterprises access to Anthropic’s most capable Opus model for coding, agentic tasks, and professional work.As AI applications become more complex, teams need models that can handle longer-running work, reason more deeply across complex analysis use tools more reliably across multi-step workflows, and support…

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 NetApp Files for EDA workloads: From revolution to breakthrough at scale

By Dustin Ward

Last year, we outlined how Azure NetApp Files helped reshape silicon design by delivering the low-latency, high-throughput storage required for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workloads at cloud scale. Since then, we have continued to extend performance and scalability. Today, we are advancing that progress with another significant step forward. Modern semiconductor design is defined by…

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…

Azure Files Entra-Only identities: Advancing cloud-native identity and security

By Dustin Ward

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Entra-Only identities for Azure Files SMB. With native Microsoft Entra ID authentication, organizations can now grant secure, identity-based access to SMB file shares using cloud-only identities. Enable Microsoft Entra Kerberos authentication This means no Active Directory, hybrid sync, or managed domain controllers required, significantly simplifying…