Azure Container Apps Express is now Generally Available
For many web apps and APIs, a container image should be enough to get started. Developers should not have to choose and configure an environment before the first deployment. Today, Azure Container Apps Express reaches general availability. It is the fastest way to go from a container image to a production-ready app on Azure, with instant provisioning, startup optimized for sub-second performance, and scale-from-zero. Customers created many thousands of Express apps during public preview and told us, clearly and often, what was missing. That feedback set the priorities for general availability, and it continues to guide what comes next. From container image to running app Express starts with the application. Bring a container image, choose a region, add the configuration your app needs, and deploy. In the Express experience, there is no environment to stand up first. Azure provisions the underlying compute, ingress, and scaling. That shorter path matters when you are shipping a web app or API. It matters even more when the thing doing the shipping is an agent: AI-assisted workflows can create and update apps far faster than anyone can configure infrastructure by hand. Speed continues after deployment. Express apps can scale to zero when idle and are optimized for sub-second startup when traffic returns. For a measured look at that experience, see Express scale from zero. Broad regional availability At general availability, Express is available in more than 40 Azure regions, covering almost every public region where Azure Container Apps is offered. You get the same direct deployment experience while placing applications close to users and data. See the current list in the Express region availability documentation. Built on Azure Container Apps Sandboxes Azure Container Apps Express runs on Azure Container Apps Sandboxes, the isolated compute layer behind its provisioning and startup speed. Developers can also use Sandboxes directly to build agent platforms, secure code-execution services, and other systems that need isolated compute on demand. The Azure Container Apps Sandboxes announcement covers the compute platform underneath Express. Where Express goes next We launched Express in public preview while its focused feature set was still taking shape. That gave customers access sooner and let real usage shape the work that followed. Since preview, we have expanded regional availability, strengthened Express for production workloads, and added capabilities that fit its direct application model. General availability makes Express ready for production use. We will continue adding features while preserving its focus on fast, simple deployment. Express offers a focused subset of Azure Container Apps capabilities. Choose Express when speed and simplicity matter most. Choose a standard Container Apps environment when you need greater control over networking, GPU compute, advanced configuration, or environment-level capabilities such as Dapr. Deploy your first Express app Ready to try it? Create an Azure Container Apps Express app. Then read the Express documentation, see Express scale from zero, or learn about Azure Container Apps Sandboxes.Enhancements to Windows Containers
Everyone, I have created a github issue list for getting Windows Containers on par with linux containers: Here are the issues I documented: Syscall/capability-scoped restriction policy for process-isolated containers (seccomp/capabilities parity) #649 — Syscall/capability-scoped restriction policy for process-isolated containers (seccomp/capabilities parity) True PID namespace isolation for process-isolated containers (server silos) #650 — True PID namespace isolation for process-isolated containers (server silos) CimFS-backed overlay mount performance parity with Linux overlayfs for container image layers #651 — CimFS-backed overlay mount performance parity with Linux overlayfs for container image layers Decouple container base image version from host OS version for process-isolated containers #652 — Decouple container base image version from host OS version for process-isolated containers Please check them out and upvote them. We need to make Windows containers as capable as Linux containers.
Azure VM Agent Status not ready
I have created a red hat openshift private cluster but the VMS are stuck in the state of "agent status not ready." I have followed these troubleshooting steps: Linux Virtual Machine Agent Status "Not Ready" - Microsoft Community Hub However, all of them seem to point to trying to check and see what is on the VM itself. I am unable to do this because I can't SSH into the machine. Has anyone else ran into this issue and been able to resolve it? I am deploying it via CLI as I was not able to do it via GUI for some reason. This is my script: #az login az account set --name "accountnamehidden" #az provider register -n Microsoft.RedHatOpenShift --wait #az provider register -n Microsoft.Compute --wait #az provider register -n Microsoft.Storage --wait #az provider register -n Microsoft.Authorization --wait $LOCATION= "eastus" # the location of your cluster $RESOURCEGROUP= "sample-rg" # the name of the resource group where you want to create your cluster $CLUSTER= "K8sDev1test" # the name of your cluster $arovnet= "sample-vnet" $mastersubnet = "k8sDev1-master-ue-snet" $workersubnet = "k8sDev1-worker-ue-snet" az aro create --resource-group "samplerg" --vnet-resource-group "sample-vnet-rg" --name $CLUSTER --vnet $arovnet --master-subnet "k8sDev1-master-ue-snet" --worker-subnet "k8sDev1-worker-ue-snet" --apiserver-visibility Private --ingress-visibility Private --fips true --outbound-type UserDefinedRouting --client-id hidden --client-secret hiddenAzure Red Hat OpenShift with hosted control planes now available in public preview
Red Hat OpenShift momentum on Azure keeps building, driven by teams standardizing on Kubernetes for application modernization and, increasingly, by AI-enabled applications that need a consistent platform for the services around them. Azure Red Hat OpenShift gives those teams a jointly engineered, first-party Azure service, and today's announcement adds a new way to run it. Today we are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Red Hat OpenShift with hosted control planes. Hosted control planes is a new deployment option that runs the OpenShift control plane as a fully managed service in a Microsoft-managed Azure subscription, operated by Microsoft and Red Hat site reliability engineers (SREs), separate from the worker nodes that run your applications. This deployment option helps organizations accelerate application modernization, increase developer velocity, streamline operations, and strengthen security while maintaining the familiar OpenShift experience jointly engineered and supported by Microsoft and Red Hat. Azure Red Hat OpenShift with standard architecture remains fully supported and actively developed. Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a unified platform for managing different workloads such as AI-enabled applications alongside VMs and containers, offloading ongoing infrastructure management to a team of Red Hat SREs, giving you a robust foundation to build, deploy and manage applications at scale. One service, two places the control plane can live The two deployment models compare like this: Dimension Control plane in your subscription Hosted control plane Control-plane location Your Azure subscription Microsoft-managed Azure subscription Who operates it Red Hat SREs, in a single-tenant control plane. You pay for control-plane nodes on every cluster Red Hat SREs, in a multi-tenant hosted control plane Upgrade coupling Control plane and workers move as one Independent; Control plane can run on 2 minor versions ahead of worker node pools. Nodepools can also be on different versions with each other. Minimum cluster footprint 3 Control-plane nodes plus 3 worker nodes Two worker nodes Figure 1. Today the control plane runs in your subscription alongside your workers. With a hosted control plane, it moves into a Microsoft-managed Azure subscription operated by Red Hat SREs, and the two planes meet through a delegated VNet integration subnet. Key benefits of Azure Red Hat Openshift with hosted control planes Organizations can modernize at their own pace and run virtual machines, containers, and cloud-native applications on a single platform while extending existing applications for AI-ready workloads. Hosted control planes also help developers move faster. Clusters provision in minutes, and development and test environments can scale down during idle periods and scale back up when needed. This enables teams to accelerate experimentation, shorten testing cycles, and bring applications to production more quickly while optimizing infrastructure spend. To support growing multi-cluster environments, hosted control planes simplify platform operations and provide greater flexibility and control. Independent control plane and worker node lifecycles give organizations more control over application upgrade timing while Microsoft and Red Hat manage the underlying platform. Organizations can scale clusters across teams, environments, and regions, customize networking with bring-your-own container network interface (CNI), and maintain operational consistency without increasing management complexity. What the Azure platform adds What sets Azure Red Hat OpenShift apart is how deeply it integrates with the broader Azure platform, helping organizations simplify operations, accelerate adoption of OpenShift, and reduce the complexity of running cloud-native applications at scale. Customers gain access to Azure's global infrastructure, enterprise security capabilities, and rich portfolio of data and AI services, accelerating modernization and innovation without requiring changes to familiar OpenShift tools and workflows. For organizations already invested in Azure, Azure Red Hat OpenShift operates as a first-party Azure service that fits naturally into existing cloud operations. Clusters can be managed, governed, secured, and monitored using the same Azure tools, policies, and automation practices already used across the broader Azure estate. Customers also benefit from a unified commercial model, integrated billing, and Azure-native management experience, while Azure Red Hat OpenShift consumption contributes toward Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, helping maximize the value of existing cloud investments. Customers are already building on that foundation. Banco Bradesco, one of the largest financial institutions in Latin America, runs its enterprise AI platform on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, using integration with Azure identity, security, and policy capabilities to unify governance across more than 200 AI initiatives in a highly regulated environment. Topicus runs its Akkuro lending platform on Azure Red Hat OpenShift and deploys in Switzerland North to keep financial data in-country, using the same Azure-native controls to maintain a repeatable deployment model across regions. Both illustrate what the Azure platform adds: a consistent operating model, enterprise-grade security and compliance, and native access to Azure data and AI services on a service jointly operated by Microsoft and Red Hat. Figure 2. The Azure platform around the service: Microsoft Entra ID managed and workload identities, a customer-managed key in Azure Key Vault for etcd encryption, Azure Monitor diagnostic settings for control-plane logs, Customer Lockbox for Microsoft Azure for support-access approval, portal (upcoming), CLI, REST API and Bicep self-service, and native integration with Azure compute, database, analytics, and machine learning services. Secure by design Azure Red Hat OpenShift with hosted control planes is secure by design, helping you run sensitive and regulated workloads with confidence without adding operational complexity. By running the control plane in a Microsoft-managed subscription, the platform reduces infrastructure exposure while maintaining secure access to applications through managed ingress. Identity management is seamless. Cluster operators and applications use managed identities and workload identities that authenticate with short-lived, automatically rotated tokens, eliminating the need to manage service principals or long-lived credentials. Organizations can also integrate with their existing identity providers, preserving established authentication and access management practices. Azure-native protections help safeguard data and support compliance requirements. Data is encrypted by default with etcd encryption, with the option to use customer-managed keys through Azure Key Vault for additional control. Confidential and sandboxed containers provide additional protection for data in use, helping organizations address stringent security, data residency, and digital sovereignty requirements without deploying a separate cloud environment. The platform is backed by enterprise-grade compliance and support. Azure Red Hat OpenShift (with standard architecture) is pre-certified for HIPAA, FedRAMP, DoD IL4, PCI-DSS, ISO, and SOC standards, supported by joint Microsoft and Red Hat incident response. Customer Lockbox for Microsoft Azure adds another layer of control by requiring explicit customer approval before Microsoft support personnel can access cluster resources. Get started now Availability is expanding, with UK South, Canada Central, Australia East, Switzerland North, Brazil South, Central India, US East 2, and West Europe among the regions supported at public preview launch. The fastest way to get started is to create three resources: a cluster, a node pool, and an external authentication provider, using either the Azure CLI extension or a Bicep template. From there, deploy a single application using workload identity to see the full flow end to end, signing in with your existing identity provider, and an application reaching Azure services with no stored credentials. See the Azure Red Hat OpenShift documentation for the current region list, supported versions, and the deployment reference, and tell us in the comments what you would like covered next. What it costs Component Price Purchasing Options OpenShift license (per worker core) $0.171 per hour per 4 worker vCPUs. The same flat rate applies to every VM series, size, and generation. Pay-as-you-go, or a 1- or 3-year reservation on the OpenShift license (available at GA) Azure infrastructure (worker VMs, storage, networking, plus control-plane nodes) Billed separately at standard Azure rates for Linux VMs. Standard clusters are also billed for the control-plane deployment; clusters with a hosted control plane are not. Pay-as-you-go, reservations, or Azure savings plan for compute Cluster management (only applicable to Azure Red Openshift with hosted control planes) A flat $0.25 per cluster per hour. Applies only to clusters with a hosted control plane. Pay-as-you-go A hosted control plane takes control-plane node cost off your bill and replaces it with a single, predictable cluster management fee. Pricing for hosted control planes is not yet reflected on the Azure Red Hat OpenShift pricing page; pricing calculator support is coming soon. Azure Red Hat OpenShift with hosted control planes is in public preview, and this pricing is preliminary and subject to change prior to general availability.
Konto got hacked and the hacker deleted it
A few weeks ago my email konto got hacked. The hacker also also deleted it. Now i cant log in in video games and in microsoft itsself but in like Disney or Gmail. I also went to the microsoft support but it dont work because they want to sent a code to a phone number or email(the email has @neplys in it) I dont know. Does somebody know my problem and could help me?Create a CLI and API like wslc but for Windows containers
The current issue is the dependency on Docker and the docker cli for Windows Containers. We would like a native solution from Microsoft for Windows Containers. This would be similar to wslc, but fully compatible for Windows containers. This could be done by leveraging existing Windows container APIs and the containerd container engine for Windows containers. I have also opened an enhancement feature on github for Windows Containers a month ago but there has been no feedback. https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-Containers/issues/643 Microsoft needs to step up and make Windows/ Windows Server containers on par with linux containersAzure Container Apps Sandboxes (Preview): Giving AI Agents a Safe Place to Work
Co-written by Nikoloz Buligini, Front End Developer at Templafy, and Jan Kalis, Azure Container Apps Sandboxes, Core AI, Microsoft Every team building with multi-tenant AI agent platforms hits the same wall. The agent is smart enough to read your code, reason about a bug, and propose a fix. But the moment it needs to take an action - clone a repo, install tooling, run a command, hit an internal endpoint - you have to answer some uncomfortable questions: where does it run, what permissions does it have and what can it access? Run it on your own infrastructure and inherit the blast radius. Give it broad network access and you have handed an autonomous process the keys to your environment. Lock it down too hard and the agent cannot do its job. This is exactly the problem Azure Container Apps Sandboxes was built to solve. And it is exactly the problem the team at Templafy solved in production. This post walks through what Sandboxes are, the features that make them a good fit for agentic workloads and how Templafy put ACA Sandboxes to work. What are Azure Container Apps Sandboxes? Azure Container Apps Sandboxes (Preview) are secure, isolated compute environments that start in seconds, scale to thousands, and do not charge you for compute while stopped. Each sandbox runs inside its own hardware-isolated microVM, fully separated from the host, the platform, and every other sandbox. Bring your own container image or use an included one, and Sandboxes handle provisioning, isolation, and lifecycle. This is the same compute fabric behind products like Cloud sandboxes in GitHub Copilot, Foundry Hosted Agents, and Azure Container Apps Express, and now you can build directly on it. For platform builders, that means enterprise-grade, multi-tenant isolation as a building block you would otherwise spend years creating. For AI agents, a sandbox becomes a self-configurable tool: spin up a fresh environment in seconds, run untrusted code, compile a project, or explore a codebase, then throw it away. On one side you empower humans to build platforms. On the other you empower agents to extend their own capabilities. The features that make Sandboxes fit agentic work A fast microVM is table stakes. What makes Sandboxes practical for real agent workloads is the control around them. Snapshots capture a fully configured environment and resume from it, ideal for long-running tasks or cloning setups. Egress controls declare exactly what a sandbox may reach, so an agent can pull from source control and package registries but nothing you did not approve. Managed identities authenticate to Azure with no secrets in the image. Automatic suspend and resume map cleanly onto how conversational agents behave, warming back up with full context when a conversation continues. Ports give your orchestrator a channel to a long-running agent process inside the sandbox. Two newer capabilities go further: virtual network integration puts an agent workspace inside your own Azure VNet with access to private endpoints, and bring your own storage lets data and artifacts outlive a session under your compliance rules. Together these turn a fast disposable VM into something you can hand to an autonomous agent in production. Which brings us to Templafy. How Templafy uses Sandboxes, in their own words The following section is written by Nikoloz, Front End Developer at Templafy. At Templafy we built an AI agent that helps our teams by doing longer-running source-code exploration on their behalf. Someone asks a question in a Slack thread, and behind the scenes the agent needs a real, isolated workspace where it can clone repositories, run tooling, and dig through code without touching anything it should not. It started as an engineer-facing tool for deep technical questions, but we recently opened it up to our product team for questions about undocumented product behavior. There, the agent first checks our Help Center through Azure AI Search with no sandbox required and only spins up a sandbox to explore the code when the docs come up short. Since these users aren't engineers, we summarize what the exploration finds into something more approachable. Funnily enough, the product team has been using it more than engineering does, and the feedback since launch has been great. We needed strong isolation, fast startup, and tight control over what each workspace could reach. Azure Container Apps Sandboxes gave us exactly that. We were sold on the model early enough that we built our own TypeScript SDK for Sandboxes before there was an official one, so we could drive the whole lifecycle from our Node stack. Here is what happens when the AI decides to start a workflow for a Slack thread: Create a sandbox from the public node-24 image. Install Git and other development tools. Clone our repositories and configure OpenCode. Restrict egress to only the Azure DevOps, package registry, and service endpoints the agent actually needs. Expose a port used to communicate with the agent runtime. Create and reuse snapshots so we do not repeat the bootstrap process on every run. Associate successful sessions with their Slack threads for a short period, so users can make follow-up requests against the same warm workspace. Stop or suspend idle sandboxes and resume them when a conversation continues. Delete failed or expired sessions. To do all of this we lean on the SDK for the full surface area: sandbox lifecycle operations, command execution, files, snapshots, ports, egress policies, public disk-image inspection, and sandbox state. Two features carry most of the weight for us. The first is restricted egress. Our agent is autonomous and works with our source code, so we are not comfortable letting it talk to the open internet. Declaring a narrow allow-list of endpoints means the workspace can do its job and nothing more, and that control is what let us ship this with confidence. The second is snapshots. Cloning repositories and configuring the toolchain is not free and doing it on every Slack message would make the agent feel slow. With snapshots we pay that cost once and resume from a ready-to-work state, so follow-ups in a thread start fast. This is only the first workflow. We are already looking at background investigations using Application Insights and eventually letting the agent open pull requests for quick bug fixes. The same isolated-workspace pattern extends cleanly to all of it. Who this is for If you are building an AI agent that needs to run code, explore a repository, or reach into your systems, and you have been nervous about where that runs, ACA Sandboxes is for you. You do not have to choose between a capable agent and a safe one. Give it a hardware-isolated workspace, declare exactly what it can touch, snapshot the setup, and let it work. Templafy went from "how do we let an agent safely explore our source code" to a production workflow running out of Slack threads, on infrastructure they controlled end to end. The building blocks are the same ones you can pick up today. Next steps Create your first sandbox - https://sandboxes.azure.com/ Explore Azure Container Apps Sandboxes documentation - https://sandboxes.azure.com/docs/sandboxes/ Start with Azure Container Apps Sandboxes samples - https://github.com/azure-samples/azure-container-apps-sandboxes/
