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…

Azure reliability, resiliency, and recoverability: Build continuity by design

By Dustin Ward

Modern cloud systems are expected to deliver more than uptime. Customers expect consistent performance, the ability to withstand disruption, and confidence that recovery is predictable and intentional. In Azure, these expectations map the three distinct concepts: reliability, resiliency, and recoverability. Explore technical methodologies with Azure Essentials Reliability describes the degree to which a service or workload…

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…