Azure IaaS series: Explore new resources for building a stronger, more efficient infrastructure

By Dustin Ward

Why a modern cloud infrastructure foundation is critical to your business Infrastructure has always been foundational to running business-critical cloud workloads; but today, it has become a strategic driver of innovation, resilience, and growth. As organizations accelerate digital transformation, infrastructure decisions increasingly shape how quickly teams can adopt AI, how reliably applications operate at global…

Unlocking document understanding with Mistral Document AI in Microsoft Foundry

By Dustin Ward

Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms – remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights. Enter mistral-document-ai-2512 in Microsoft Foundry. This new…

Instant access incremental snapshots: Restore without waiting

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re excited to introduce instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra Disk, delivering an industry-leading snapshot experience where creation, disk restore, and production-ready performance all happen instantly. Instant access snapshots of Pv2 and Ultra Disk are usable immediately upon creation, allowing you to restore new disks without waiting…

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud adds governance, productivity, and support for large AI models securely running even when completely disconnected

By Dustin Ward

As digital sovereignty becomes a strategic requirement, organizations are rethinking how they deploy critical infrastructure and AI capabilities under tighter regulatory expectations and higher risk conditions. Microsoft’s approach to sovereignty is grounded in enabling enterprises, public sectors, and regulated industries to participate in the digital economy securely, independently, and on their own terms. The Microsoft…

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…