Azure app platform at Ignite 2025: New innovations for all your apps and agents

Software is evolving faster than ever, and organizations now operate across multiple generations of application architectures at once: AI apps and agents, cloud-native microservices, modernized enterprise applications, and mission-critical workloads that have powered their businesses for decades. To innovate at the pace AI demands, organizations need a unified platform that supports where they are today and accelerates where they’re going. The need has never been clearer: 95% of IT decision makers believe that continued app modernization is essential to their success¹, and the number of companies using agentic AI is expected to triple in the next two years².

At Microsoft Ignite, we’re introducing new capabilities that help to make Azure the most complete platform for next generation applications while continuing to power the systems businesses rely on. Microsoft Foundry now unifies the AI app lifecycle, platform-wide MCP support brings consistent tools and governance, and new multi-agent support and AI-assisted operations make Azure a fast, secure path to build and scale agentic apps. Azure is also expanding modernization options across a variety of architectures and delivering more performant and flexible Kubernetes and API management.

Azure application platform services

Build AI apps and agents faster

AI is no longer an add-on; it’s becoming the center of modern application architecture. Microsoft Foundry is evolving into the single destination for building AI applications and agentic systems, bringing the entire development lifecycle into one unified experience. From model selection and evaluation to safety, observability, deployment, and connector integrations, Foundry gives developers one place to design, build, and operationalize agents that don’t just answer questions—they reason, act, and connect deeply to business systems.

A major accelerator is Microsoft Foundry’s expanded tools layer. More than 1,400 business systems—including SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday—are now available as Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools through Logic Apps connectors (public preview). Customers can also make internal REST APIs or custom tools MCP tools available using API Management and API Center (public preview), ensuring every system of record can be part of an agent’s workflow and accelerating time to value.

Azure’s platform-wide support for MCP adds the standardization and governance enterprises need as AI apps scale. Azure Functions can now host MCP servers (GA) with real-time streaming. API Management brings policy-driven governance for MCP endpoints (GA), and Azure API Center now acts as an enterprise MCP registry (GA), enabling secure publishing, discovery, and reuse of trusted MCP tools across teams.

We’re also making it easier to orchestrate multi-agent workflows. Microsoft Agent Framework Enhanced Durable Functions (public preview) now supports multi-agent patterns with built-in orchestration and OpenAI SDK integration. Azure Container Apps enables dynamic multi-container agent deployments including simplified deployment using Docker Compose (public preview). And with Logic Apps agent loop (GA), developers can orchestrate iterative, goal driven agentic business processes without writing custom code.

Finally, governance and cost control remain essential for production AI. AI Gateway in API Management, now available in the Foundry Control Plane (public preview), secures model access, enforces policies, and optimizes token usage. With A2A support (public preview) these governance and security capabilities s now extend to agent-to-agent interactions as well.

Across Azure and Microsoft Foundry, customers get the complete stack to run every type of AI application and agent. AT&T used AKS and Microsoft Foundry to build a scalable, secure agent platform that now powers more than 70 generative AI solutions for 100,000+ employees, improving customer care efficiency and strengthening enterprise-wide compliance.

Run any app with any architecture

As organizations move toward AI-driven architectures, modernizing existing applications becomes essential, but it must happen without interrupting the systems that keep the business running. Azure supports modernization at any pace and for any architecture, whether migrating applications as-is, containerizing, replatforming, or gradually rebuilding over time.

GitHub Copilot now accelerates the most time-consuming early steps of modernization. It can assess legacy .NET and Java codebases, recommend modernization paths, generate updated code, and produce IaC templates for Azure services. At Ignite, GitHub Copilot app modernization expands these capabilities with .NET Framework-to-.NET and code-to-cloud upgrades, Java modernization in IntelliJ, Java 25 upgrades, and J2EE-to-JakartaEE transformations. It also adds containerization assist integration to update app code, generate Dockerfiles and deploy artifacts for AKS Automatic, AKS, and Azure Container Apps, plus adds modernization support for PostgreSQL and SQL databases on Azure (public preview).

Azure provides multiple modernization paths. Teams can adopt containers on AKS or Azure Container Apps, introduce serverless or event-driven extensions, or modernize APIs using API Management without rewriting back-end systems.

New platform capabilities make this even more flexible. Managed Instance on Azure App Service (public preview) is a new approach that lets organizations bring Windows services, custom runtimes, and legacy dependencies into a PaaS environment without code rewrites, reducing migration timelines from months to weeks and unlocking access to Microsoft Foundry. For hybrid environments, Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) with OpenShift Virtualization (GA) unifies VMs and containers on a single Kubernetes-based platform.

Across these options, Azure gives organizations the flexibility to modernize on their terms and bring any application into an AI-ready architecture. Banco Bradesco’s story in BRK104 shows how modernization unlocks AI at scale. By modernizing with Azure Red Hat OpenShift, they created a unified foundation that enabled them to accelerate AI adoption with Microsoft Foundry. This modernization effort enabled secure, multi-cloud operations, streamlined governance, and accelerated more than 200 enterprise AI initiatives, improving resolution speed, audit efficiency, and overall agility.

Scale globally with high performance

Mission-critical applications demand global scale, low latency, and consistent performance. Azure delivers with zone-redundant services, global load balancing, and high-availability capabilities designed for modern, distributed workloads.

Azure Kubernetes Service extends this with automatic upgrades, policy-driven governance, and global operations support for multi-region environments. And with Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager for Arc-enabled clusters (public preview), organizations can now manage and deploy distributed and AI workloads across hybrid, edge, and multi-cluster environments through a single control plane, unifying configuration, deployment, and operations at scale.

For APIs that power large-scale digital platforms, API Management Premium v2 (GA) introduces a high-performance tier designed for the most demanding workloads, delivering higher capacity, unlimited included calls, lower latency, and advanced security features.

Together, these capabilities make Azure the platform for applications that need to scale globally, run reliably, and deliver high-performance experiences anywhere. With Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Ahold Delhaize USA uses fully managed, cloud-native orchestration to deploy efficiently and auto-scale with demand. AKS provides multizone high availability and built-in self-healing to ensure service continuity—even during peak traffic. By containerizing their applications, Ahold Delhaize USA now ships updates in hours instead of weeks, enabling them to deliver new features at the pace customers expect.

Secure, govern, and simplify operations

Operating applications at scale requires a secure, governed, and automated foundation, especially as AI-driven architectures introduce new complexity. Azure’s application platform brings security, policy, automation, and AI-powered operations together to help teams stay reliable, compliant, and efficient.

AKS Automatic embodies this shift by moving more operational responsibility into the platform so teams can focus on building, not managing. With managed system node pools (public preview), Azure now operates the critical Kubernetes components that previously ran in customer environments, simplifying operations and improving reliability. A new pod readiness SLA (GA) so that eligible pods become ready within five minutes at the 99.9th percentile, a first in the industry focused on application readiness, not just control-plane availability.

To reduce operational overhead even further, expanded functionality in Azure SRE Agent (public preview) bring AI-powered diagnostics and prescriptive insights directly into the platform. The latest update introduces no-code automation, empowering teams to tailor processes to their unique environments with minimal engineering overhead. Event-driven triggers enable proactive checks and faster incident response, helping minimize downtime and protect revenue. Thousands of early adopters such as Ecolab have been critical in helping shape the roadmap during the public preview.

Security remains a top priority, and Microsoft is making it easier to protect applications from code to cloud. Microsoft and GitHub have introduced a natively integrated, end-to-end security solution (now in preview) that combines Microsoft Defender for Cloud with GitHub Advanced Security to deliver real-time visibility, map runtime threats directly to code for accurate prioritization, and speed remediation with AI-generated fixes through Copilot Autofix and GitHub Copilot. Additionally, confidential container support—now GA in Azure Red Hat OpenShift and in public preview in Azure Container Apps—provides hardware-level encryption for sensitive production workloads.

These advancements underscore Azure’s commitment to a highly automated, secure, and governed platform that helps teams innovate faster and operate confidently at global scale. The Access Group modernized its architecture with Azure API Management, integrating Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Search that can enforce centralized, policy-driven governance for every AI model interaction. This foundation now supports the secure, compliant, and scalable deployment of 50+ AI-powered products, achieves ISO 42001 certification, and delivers real-time observability across 22 product suites.

Recent Azure application platform customer stories

Getting started

Explore all these innovations at Microsoft Ignite by joining Azure application platform and Microsoft Foundry sessions, trying hands-on labs, and reviewing new architecture guides and documentation. Whether you’re building new AI-native applications, modernizing existing systems, or running mission-critical workloads across the globe, Azure provides the platform to move forward with speed, safety, and confidence.

Resources

• Explore more of Azure application platform
• Try Microsoft Foundry and start building agentic apps

Azure app platform sessions at Ignite

1. The State of Application Modernization, Red Hat, June 2024: https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/app-modernization-report
2. What every company can learn from Frontier firms leading the AI revolution, IDC sponsored by Microsoft, November 2025: https://marketingassets.microsoft.com/gdc/gdcvSFjHm/original