Securing Your AI Agents Before They Ship: Red Teaming with Microsoft PyRIT
Securing Your AI Agents Before They Ship: Red Teaming with Microsoft PyRIT You wouldn't ship a web app without running OWASP ZAP or Snyk. So why are AI agents going to production without a single security scan? Prompt injection, data leakage, system prompt theft — the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications reads like a checklist of things most teams haven't tested for. PyRIT is Microsoft's open-source answer: an automation framework battle-tested on 100+ products including Copilot. But here's the catch — PyRIT is a research library. To make it work in a real engineering workflow, you need to wrap it. This post shows you how. In this post: Why AI red teaming is fundamentally different from traditional security testing What PyRIT gives you out of the box How to build a thin wrapper that turns PyRIT into a config-driven, pipeline-ready scanner When and how to plug it into your CI/CD workflow Customizing every step for your threat model 🛡️ Why AI Red Teaming Is Different If you're building agentic AI — systems that reason, call tools, and take actions — you already know that traditional security testing doesn't cut it. Microsoft's AI Red Team learned this the hard way after red-teaming 100+ generative AI products. Three things make AI red teaming unique: You're testing two risk surfaces at once — security vulnerabilities (prompt injection, data exfiltration) *and* responsible AI harms (bias, toxicity, manipulation). Traditional pen testers focus on one. Outputs are probabilistic — the same prompt can produce different responses across runs. You can't just assert on a fixed output. You need automated scoring at scale. Every architecture is different — standalone chatbots, RAG pipelines, multi-agent workflows, tool-calling agents. A single test harness has to flex across all of them. The OWASP LLM Top 10 (2025) gives us the taxonomy — prompt injection, sensitive information disclosure, excessive agency, system prompt leakage, data poisoning, supply chain risks, improper output handling, embedding weaknesses, misinformation, and unbounded consumption. Every AI agent you deploy is exposed to all ten. The question is whether *you* discover the gaps or your users do. 🔧 What PyRIT Gives You PyRIT (Python Risk Identification Tool) started as internal scripts at Microsoft in 2022. Today it's a 3,800-star, MIT-licensed framework with 129 contributors and a published paper. "We were able to pick a harm category, generate several thousand malicious prompts, and use PyRIT's scoring engine to evaluate the output from the Copilot system — all in the matter of hours instead of weeks." — Microsoft Security Blog The building blocks: 53+ datasets — AIRT, HarmBench, AdvBench, XSTest, and more. Curated adversarial prompts covering content harms, jailbreaks, data exfiltration, and social bias. 70+ prompt converters — Base64, ROT13, Leetspeak, Unicode confusables, LLM-powered rephrasing, translation, multimodal injection. They stack — a prompt can be translated, then Base64-encoded, then embedded in an image. 6 attack strategies — from simple `PromptSendingAttack` (single-turn) to `CrescendoAttack` (gradual escalation), `TreeOfAttacksWithPruning` (TAP), and multi-turn dialogue attacks. 20+ scorers — LLM-as-judge, Azure AI Content Safety, true/false classifiers, Likert scales. 10+ targets — OpenAI, Azure, HuggingFace, HTTP endpoints, Playwright, WebSockets. This is powerful — PyRIT gives you the components — datasets, converters, attack strategies, scorers — but not the glue. You still need something that loads a config, wires the right components together, runs attacks, scores the results, and tells your pipeline pass or fail. That's what a wrapper does. 🏗️ Building an Enterprise Wrapper The idea is simple: take PyRIT's primitives and compose them into an opinionated, config-driven pipeline that any developer can run with a single command. Below is given the idea on how we can create the wrapper around PyRIT to make it useful for agentic ai security testing, but this is not limited. The Flow Everything starts with a YAML config and ends with a pass/fail exit code: The key insight: every step in this pipeline is configurable through YAML, not code. Switching attack strategies, adding converters, adjusting thresholds — it's all one config edit away. Project Structure At POC level, the wrapper is lean — an orchestrator that stitches PyRIT's components together: The heart of it is `runner.py` — a single orchestrator that: Reads the YAML config Dynamically imports your agent and wraps it as a PyRIT target Loads datasets (built-in + your custom prompts) Runs attacks in escalating phases — plain → encoded → semantic → multi-turn Scores every response using LLM-as-judge Maps findings to OWASP LLM Top 10 categories Generates reports (JSON, Markdown) Evaluates the release gate — pass or fail That's it. One file doing the orchestration, a handful of helpers, and a YAML config. You can start here and grow the structure as your needs evolve. The Configuration A single YAML file drives everything: scan: name: "my-agent-security-scan" # Point to your agent — any Python callable target: module: "my_agent.main" function: "handle_prompt" # Attack strategies to run strategies: - name: "prompt_sending" # Single-turn baseline - name: "crescendo" # Gradual escalation max_turns: 5 # Prompt transformations — they stack automatically converters: - name: "Base64Converter" - name: "LeetspeakConverter" - name: "TranslationConverter" # Adversarial prompt sets datasets: - "airt_illegal" # Built-in: Microsoft AI Red Team - "harmbench" # Built-in: harm evaluation benchmark - path: "datasets/custom_prompts.yaml" # Release gate thresholds gate: fail_on: critical_findings: 0 # Zero tolerance for critical high_findings: 3 max_score: 0.3 # Defense rate must exceed 70% Point the target at your agent, pick your strategies and datasets, set your thresholds — run. Teams can start scanning their agents in an afternoon, not weeks. 🔄 Plugging Into Your Pipeline Since the wrapper is a pip-installable package(we can use setup tools or poetry to build and make it pip installable), integrating it into any CI/CD system is straightforward — `pip install`, then call the CLI. No custom actions or marketplace extensions needed. The key decision is when to run scans. Not every merge needs a full red team pass. Here's what works in practice: The idea is that developers can optionally run quick scans locally as a fast feedback loop, while full scans are manually triggered or approval-gated — the tech lead or architect decides when it's worth running a comprehensive assessment based on the nature of the changes. Since it's just a CLI, integration is the same everywhere — GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or a shell script. Install the package, call `pyrit-scan run`, check the exit code. ⚙️ Customization Without Forking The whole point of a wrapper is that teams customize behavior through configuration — not by modifying framework code. What to Customize How Example Which agent to test Point target.module + target.function in YAML to any Python callable Your chatbot, RAG pipeline, or multi-agent workflow Attack strategies Add/remove entries under strategies in YAML Start with prompt_sending , add crescendo when ready Prompt transformations List converters in YAML — they stack automatically Base64 → Leetspeak → Translation = multi-phase evasion Datasets Use built-in (53+) or add custom YAML prompt files HIPAA prompts, financial compliance scenarios Scoring thresholds Set per-OWASP-category thresholds in gate.fail_on Zero tolerance for data leakage (LLM02), relaxed for misinformation (LLM09) Report formats List formats in reporting.formats JSON for automation, PDF for compliance, JUnit for dashboards New attack classes Register via custom_attacks in YAML — module + class name No framework code change, no PR needed 🎯 Start Red Teaming Today AI red teaming isn't a nice-to-have anymore. If you're shipping agentic AI — systems that call tools, access data, and take actions on behalf of users — you need automated security testing in your pipeline. PyRIT gives you the primitives. A thin wrapper gives you the automation. Together, they turn AI security from a one-off exercise into a continuous, measurable practice. The pattern: YAML config → wrap your agent → run attacks → score → map to OWASP → gate the release. Build it once. Run it on every release. Sleep better. Resources PyRIT on GitHub — source code, docs, and community PyRIT Documentation — getting started guides and API reference OWASP LLM Top 10 (2025) — the industry standard risk taxonomy Microsoft AI Red Team Hub — threat models, bug bars, and best practices 3 Takeaways from Red Teaming 100 Products — lessons learned at scale PyRIT Launch Blog — origin story and key design decisions PyRIT Paper (arXiv) — the academic paperHow Microsoft 1ES uses agentic AI to take on security and compliance at scale
Microsoft’s Customer Zero blog series gives an insider view of how Microsoft builds and operates Microsoft using our trusted, enterprise-grade IQ platform. Learn best practices from our engineering teams with real-world lessons, architectural patterns, and operational strategies for pressure-tested solutions in building, operating, and scaling AI apps and agent fleets across the organization. What we do Within Microsoft’s One Engineering System (1ES) organization, teams build and maintain the internal engineering systems that product groups across the company rely on to ship and secure their services. These shared tools and processes support teams responsible for mission-critical products, from modern cloud-native platforms to long-lived legacy applications. Security, compliance, and reliability work is non-negotiable at this scale. But it has to coexist with developer productivity and velocity across thousands of independently owned repositories. The problem: the CVE and compliance treadmill Here’s the loop we kept living: A security or compliance alert arrives, often via automation like Dependabot or a CVE finding. The version gets bumped, or the config gets nudged. CI is green. The PR merges. Production fails or the finding reopens because the fix required code changes beyond a version bump or a config flip. This repeats across repositories, teams, and organizations. And the hard truth is not all vulnerabilities are mechanical version bumps, and not all compliance findings are config tweaks. Many introduce behavioral or security model changes. Automation handles the easy cases but silently fails on the hard ones. A second pattern compounds it: when a service has 30+ open action items spanning OTel audit, identity, secret rotation, and CodeQL findings, just figuring out which ones are quick versus deep can take longer than the fixes themselves. Multiply this across Microsoft’s repo footprint and the cost becomes months of engineering time spent on work that doesn’t ship new customer value. But this is exactly the kind of challenge AI was made for: high-speed, high-scale evaluation and judgment calls, coached by human expertise. Why this is solvable now In the previous era of software development, an average CVE alert meant hours of developer toil. Three things changed at once. Frontier models like GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 can now reason about context, intent, and tradeoffs not just generate code. Agent runtimes like GitHub Copilot CLI can read repositories, run tools, execute tests, and open pull requests end-to-end. And we’ve started encoding hard-won domain expertise as portable skills, so an agent doesn’t have to re-derive what an expert already knows. None of these is enough alone. Frontier models without runtimes are just chat. Runtimes without skills hallucinate confidently. Skills without judgment automate the wrong thing. Together, bounded by human–AI partnership patterns that make escalation a first-class behavior, they enable a safer, more disciplined way to tackle judgment-heavy engineering work. How we approach it: collaborate, don’t automate The co-creative model Instead of treating AI as a script executor, we treat agents as collaborators operating within explicit guardrails: Agents propose changes based on skills and available context. Humans review, approve, and retain final ownership of every change. Skills over prompts Agents start cold. They don’t have repo-specific context beyond the invoked skill. A skill captures the exact steps, decisions, and edge cases a human expert would apply to a specific class of problem. Skills are written once as Markdown and loaded only when needed: focused context, improved complexity handling, more predictable behavior. We author skills with agents too. The same operating model we use for remediation. Human owns the decision, agent does the work, signals feed back is how the skills themselves get written and refined. One of those agents, Ember, is now open-sourced on awesome-copilot. A real example: the XStream CVE Some CVEs include changes in aspects like default security models, which require code changes beyond just bumping the dependency version. Take the XStream dependency update. In the previous 1.4.17 version, any class deserializes through a default-allow classification. But in the latest update, classification changed to default-deny meaning we need to make permitted types explicit. Once we find the XStream call sites, we need to fix type permissions after each instantiation and make sure that change propagates from test, to PR, to run. This is the type of judgment-heavy work where naïve automation creates risk and blocks developers from focusing on feature work. How execution works The agent loads the relevant skill for the task at hand. If it encounters ambiguity or risk, it stops and escalates rather than guessing. The agent goes through required steps: compile, test, pull request, as explicitly agreed upon in the guidance we provide. After each run, the agent emits an Agent Signals: a structured self-assessment of what worked, what was hard, and where the skill fell short. These compound across sessions so the system improves continuously. Autonomy is great, but trust is far better. Between the CVE context, the skills, and our working agreement with the agent, we’re creating a dynamic where the agent feels empowered to execute until it reaches a point of uncertainty. This cuts down the risk of hallucinations dramatically and scales repeatable, trustworthy execution. The most important issues get surfaced for humans in the loop, where human judgment actually matters. Closing the loop: dev-side and ops-side Skills and agents handle the dev-side work: CVE remediation, compliance findings, codebase changes that need judgment. On the ops side, Azure SRE Agent handles at-scale data analysis and operational toil. Same philosophy on both sides: agents act within explicit guardrails, humans own the decisions that matter, and signals from every run feed back into the system. Then the two sides connect. Every Agent Signal our dev-side skills emit flows into Azure SRE Agent, which analyzes them at scale, identifies where skills are degrading or falling short, opens PRs against the skills themselves to fix the gaps, and sends us a daily skill-health report. The ops-side agent maintains the dev-side agents: agents improving agents, while humans review and merge every change. The same human-in-the-loop discipline that governs a CVE fix governs a skill fix. Impact Across Microsoft, 1ES supports teams working on hundreds of repos at a variety of ages and sizes. Agents enable velocity while skills enable uniqueness which is what helps us scale across such a vast enterprise. Impact of the frontier models, GitHub Copilot, agent skills and agent signals for compliance work. Real engineering time saved We’re finding 18-15 hours of manual work compressed into ~9 hours of agent+skill assisted work – a 50-60% reduction overall, with some compliance work moving from 3-4 hrs manually to 30 min with the agent+skill. What devs told us “Considering I didn’t know anything about any of this, including never having seen the IaC in question, I’d say at least a week’s worth, done in less than 10 prompts.” — Patrick, Senior Engineer “Many times with [compliance], the actual changes are minimal, but reading the docs and knowing what applies to your app can be more time consuming… When you have 30+ action items, you need to go hunting for which one is quick versus time-consuming. This [agent+skills] saves a lot of time.” — Greg, Engineering Manager “The [agent+skills] eliminates most early-phase toil — up to ~90% — but 0% of the last-mile effort. The bottleneck shifts entirely to validation and deployment.” — CloudBuild team That last quote is the one we keep coming back to. The agent+skills doesn’t eliminate the work, it changes where the work lives. Discovery, scoping, and first-draft remediation collapse. Validation and deployment become the new ceiling. That’s the right problem to have and it tells us where to invest next. Security and compliance response with agents is evolving from reactive maintenance to a proactive, strategic defense capability. What we’ve learned On quality and trust With agents, silent confidence is more dangerous than visible uncertainty. Testing agents cold exposes gaps early, before risk compounds. Build uncertainty into skills, and lean on Agent Signals to capture what worked, what was hard, and where the skill fell short. When agents report honestly, the next run starts smarter than the last one. Quality is measured, not assumed. We evaluate every PR on an A/B/C scale, and we run agents that evaluate other agents’ output, closing the loop between execution and assessment. On scaling Not all work should be automated. Some work requires human-AI collaboration. Encoding expertise will always be more valuable than scaling generic prompts. Start with a win in one repo, then slowly scale out that skill to other teams and repos. Where teams can start Teams don’t adopt AI through mandates. They adopt it through trust, built on quality results in their code. Start with one team, one skill, and one real win. Identify a CVE or dependency issue that appears repeatedly across repositories. Write the fix as Markdown, as if you’re onboarding a new engineer. That’s your first skill file. Test the skill with a cold agent on a real repo with a real problem. Iterate until the agent knows both how to act and when to stop. Agents can assess their own work and flag gaps in skills. Want to learn more? Watch the demo video of the dependency update scenario Learn more about the co-creative framework Discover how the GitHub Copilot CLI can help you run and orchestrate agents Learn more about Agent Signals Learn more about Agent Skills Read the companion ops-side story: How we build and use Azure SRE Agent with agentic workflowsExtracting and Auditing Azure DevOps Permissions at Scale with PowerShell
Managing access in Azure DevOps is easy at small scale — and increasingly opaque as organizations grow. This post introduces ADO Permissions Output, an open-source PowerShell toolset that queries Azure DevOps REST APIs across 30+ security namespaces, decodes bitmask permissions, resolves cryptic GUIDs and tokens into readable names, and produces structured JSON/CSV output ready for Power BI. It also surfaces "ghost" members — users who appear in ADO through nested Entra groups but hold no active entitlement — which the standard Graph API alone cannot detect. Whether you're preparing for a compliance review or just want to know who actually has access to what, this tool closes the gap between the ADO portal and a complete audit picture.Announcing AWS with Azure SRE Agent: Cross-Cloud Investigation using the brand new AWS DevOps Agent
Overview Connect Azure SRE Agent to AWS services using the official AWS MCP server. Query AWS documentation, execute any of the 15,000+ AWS APIs, run operational workflows, and kick off incident investigations through AWS DevOps Agent, which is now generally available. The AWS MCP server connects Azure SRE Agent to AWS documentation, APIs, regional availability data, pre-built operational workflows (Agent SOPs), and AWS DevOps Agent for incident investigation. When connected, the proxy exposes 23 MCP tools organized into four categories: documentation and knowledge, API execution, guided workflows, and DevOps Agent operations. How it works The MCP Proxy for AWS runs as a local stdio process that SRE Agent spawns via uvx . The proxy handles AWS authentication using credentials you provide as environment variables. No separate infrastructure or container deployment is needed. In the portal, you use the generic MCP server (User provided connector) option with stdio transport. Key capabilities Area Capabilities Documentation Search all AWS docs, API references, and best practices; retrieve pages as markdown API execution Execute authenticated calls across 15,000+ AWS APIs with syntax validation and error handling Agent SOPs Pre-built multi-step workflows following AWS Well-Architected principles Regional info List all AWS regions, check service and feature availability by region Infrastructure Provision VPCs, databases, compute instances, storage, and networking resources Troubleshooting Analyze CloudWatch logs, CloudTrail events, permission issues, and application failures Cost management Set up billing alerts, analyze resource usage, and review cost data DevOps Agent Start AWS incident investigations, read root cause analyses, get remediation recommendations, and chat with AWS DevOps Agent Note: The AWS MCP Server is free to use. You pay only for the AWS resources consumed by API calls made through the server. All actions respect your existing IAM policies. Prerequisites Azure SRE Agent resource deployed in Azure AWS account with IAM credentials configured uv package manager installed on the SRE Agent host (used to run the MCP proxy via uvx ) IAM permissions: aws-mcp:InvokeMcp , aws-mcp:CallReadOnlyTool , and optionally aws-mcp:CallReadWriteTool Step 1: Create AWS access keys The AWS MCP server authenticates using AWS access keys (an Access Key ID and a Secret Access Key). These keys are tied to an IAM user in your AWS account. You create them in the AWS Management Console. Navigate to IAM in the AWS Console Sign in to the AWS Management Console In the top search bar, type IAM and select IAM from the results (Direct URL: https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/ ) In the left sidebar, select Users (Direct URL: https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home#/users ) Create a dedicated IAM user Create a dedicated user for SRE Agent rather than reusing a personal account. This makes it easy to scope permissions and rotate keys independently. Select Create user Enter a descriptive user name (e.g., sre-agent-mcp ) Do not check "Provide user access to the AWS Management Console" (this user only needs programmatic access) Select Next Select Attach policies directly Select Create policy (opens in a new tab) and paste the following JSON in the JSON editor: { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "aws-mcp:InvokeMcp", "aws-mcp:CallReadOnlyTool", "aws-mcp:CallReadWriteTool" ], "Resource": "*" } ] } Select Next, give the policy a name (e.g., SREAgentMCPAccess ), and select Create policy Back on the Create user tab, select the refresh button in the policy list, search for SREAgentMCPAccess , and check it Select Next > Create user Generate access keys After the user is created, generate the access keys that SRE Agent will use: From the Users list, select the user you just created (e.g., sre-agent-mcp ) Select the Security credentials tab Scroll down to the Access keys section Select Create access key For the use case, select Third-party service Check the confirmation checkbox and select Next Optionally add a description tag (e.g., Azure SRE Agent ) and select Create access key Copy both values immediately: Value Example format Where you'll use it Access Key ID <your-access-key-id> Connector environment variable AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID Secret Access Key <your-secret-access-key> Connector environment variable AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY Important: The Secret Access Key is shown only once on this screen. If you close the page without copying it, you must delete the key and create a new one. Select Download .csv file as a backup, then store the file securely and delete it after configuring the connector. Tip: For production use, also add service-specific IAM permissions for the AWS APIs you want SRE Agent to call. The MCP permissions above grant access to the MCP server itself, but individual API calls (e.g., ec2:DescribeInstances , logs:GetQueryResults ) require their own IAM actions. Start broad for testing, then scope down using the principle of least privilege. Required permissions summary Permission Description Required? aws-mcp:InvokeMcp Base access to the AWS MCP server Yes aws-mcp:CallReadOnlyTool Read operations (describe, list, get, search) Yes aws-mcp:CallReadWriteTool Write operations (create, update, delete resources) Optional Step 2: Add the MCP connector Connect the AWS MCP server to your SRE Agent using the portal. The proxy runs as a local stdio process that SRE Agent spawns via uvx . It handles SigV4 signing using the AWS credentials you provide as environment variables. Determine the AWS MCP endpoint for your region The AWS MCP server has regional endpoints. Choose the one matching your AWS resources: AWS Region MCP Endpoint URL us-east-1 (default) https://aws-mcp.us-east-1.api.aws/mcp us-west-2 https://aws-mcp.us-west-2.api.aws/mcp eu-west-1 https://aws-mcp.eu-west-1.api.aws/mcp Note: Without the --metadata AWS_REGION=<region> argument, operations default to us-east-1 . You can always override the region in your query. Using the Azure portal In Azure portal, navigate to your SRE Agent resource Select Builder > Connectors Select Add connector Select MCP server (User provided connector) and select Next Configure the connector with these values: Field Value Name aws-mcp Connection type stdio Command python3 Arguments -c , __import__('subprocess').check_call(['pip','install','-q','mcp-proxy-for-aws']);__import__('os').execlp('mcp-proxy-for-aws','mcp-proxy-for-aws','https://aws-mcp.us-east-1.api.aws/mcp','--metadata','AWS_REGION=us-west-2') Environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<your-access-key-id> , AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<your-secret-access-key> Select Next to review Select Add connector This is equivalent to the following MCP client configuration used by tools like Claude Desktop or Amazon Kiro CLI: { "mcpServers": { "aws-mcp": { "command": "uvx", "args": [ "mcp-proxy-for-aws@latest", "https://aws-mcp.us-east-1.api.aws/mcp", "--metadata", "AWS_REGION=us-west-2" ] } } } Important: Store the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY securely. In the portal, environment variables for connectors are stored encrypted. For production deployments, consider using a dedicated IAM user with scoped-down permissions (see Step 1). Never commit credentials to source control. Tip: If your SRE Agent host already has AWS credentials configured (e.g., via aws configure or an instance profile), the proxy will pick them up automatically from the environment. In that case, you can omit the explicit AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables. Note: After adding the connector, the agent service initializes the MCP connection. This may take up to 30 seconds as uvx downloads the proxy package on first run (~89 dependencies). If the connector does not show Connected status after a minute, see the Troubleshooting section below. Step 3: Add an AWS skill Skills give agents domain knowledge and best practices for specific tool sets. Create an AWS skill so your agent knows how to troubleshoot AWS services, provision infrastructure, and follow operational workflows. Tip: Why skills over subagents? Skills inject domain knowledge into the main agent's context, so it can use AWS expertise without handing off to a separate agent. Conversation context stays intact and there's no handoff latency. Use a subagent when you need full isolation with its own system prompt and tool restrictions. Navigate to Builder > Skills Select Add skill Paste the following skill configuration: api_version: azuresre.ai/v1 kind: SkillConfiguration metadata: owner: your-team@contoso.com version: "1.0.0" spec: name: aws_infrastructure_operations display_name: AWS Infrastructure & Operations description: | AWS infrastructure and operations: EC2, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, IAM, VPC, and others. Also covers AWS DevOps Agent for incident investigation, root cause analysis, and remediation. Use for querying AWS resources, investigating issues, provisioning infrastructure, searching documentation, running AWS API calls via the AWS MCP server, and coordinating investigations between Azure SRE Agent and AWS DevOps Agent. instructions: | ## Overview The AWS MCP Server is a managed remote MCP server that gives AI assistants authenticated access to AWS services. It combines documentation access, authenticated API execution, and pre-built Agent SOPs in a single interface. **Authentication:** Handled automatically by the MCP Proxy for AWS, running as a local stdio process. All actions respect existing IAM policies configured in the connector environment variables. **Regional endpoints:** The MCP server has regional endpoints. The proxy is configured with a default region; you can override by specifying a region in your queries (e.g., "list my EC2 instances in eu-west-1"). ## Searching Documentation Use aws___search_documentation to find information across all AWS docs. ## Executing AWS API Calls Use aws___call_aws to execute authenticated AWS API calls. The tool handles SigV4 signing and provides syntax validation. ## Using Agent SOPs Use aws___retrieve_agent_sop to find and follow pre-built workflows. SOPs provide step-by-step guidance following AWS Well-Architected principles. ## Regional Operations Use aws___list_regions to see all available AWS regions and aws___get_regional_availability to check service support in specific regions. ## AWS DevOps Agent Integration The AWS MCP server includes tools for AWS DevOps Agent: - aws___list_agent_spaces / aws___create_agent_space: Manage AgentSpaces - aws___create_investigation: Start incident investigations (5-8 min async) - aws___get_task: Poll investigation status - aws___list_journal_records: Read root cause analysis - aws___list_recommendations / aws___get_recommendation: Get remediation steps - aws___start_evaluation: Run proactive infrastructure evaluations - aws___create_chat / aws___send_message: Chat with AWS DevOps Agent ## Troubleshooting | Issue | Solution | |-------|----------| | Access denied errors | Verify IAM policy includes aws-mcp:InvokeMcp and aws-mcp:CallReadOnlyTool | | API call fails | Check IAM policy includes the specific service action | | Wrong region results | Specify the region explicitly in your query | | Proxy connection error | Verify uvx is installed and the proxy can reach aws-mcp.region.api.aws | mcp_connectors: - aws-mcp Select Save Note: The mcp_connectors: - aws-mcp at the bottom links this skill to the connector you created in Step 2. The skill's instructions teach the agent how to use the 23 AWS MCP tools effectively. Step 4: Test the integration Open a new chat session with your SRE Agent and try these example prompts to verify the connection is working. Quick verification Start with this simple test to confirm the AWS MCP proxy is connected and authenticating correctly: What AWS regions are available? If the agent returns a list of regions, the connection is working. If you see authentication errors, go back and verify the IAM credentials and permissions from Step 1. Documentation and knowledge Search AWS documentation for EKS best practices for production clusters What AWS regions support Amazon Bedrock? Read the AWS documentation page about S3 bucket policies Infrastructure queries List all my running EC2 instances in us-east-1 Show me the details of my EKS cluster named "production-cluster" What Lambda functions are deployed in my account? CloudWatch and monitoring What CloudWatch alarms are currently in ALARM state? Show me the CPU utilization metrics for my RDS instance over the last 24 hours Search CloudWatch Logs for errors in the /aws/lambda/my-function log group Troubleshooting workflows My EC2 instance i-0abc123 is not reachable. Help me troubleshoot. My Lambda function is timing out. Walk me through the investigation. Find an Agent SOP for troubleshooting EKS pod scheduling failures Cross-cloud scenarios My Azure Function is failing when calling AWS S3. Check if there are any S3 service issues and review the bucket policy for "my-data-bucket". Compare the health of my AWS EKS cluster with my Azure AKS cluster. AWS DevOps Agent investigations List all available AWS DevOps Agent spaces in my account Create an AWS DevOps Agent investigation for the high error rate on my Lambda function "order-processor" in us-west-2 Start a chat with AWS DevOps Agent about my EKS cluster performance Cross-agent investigation (Azure SRE Agent + AWS DevOps Agent) My application is failing across both Azure and AWS. Start an AWS DevOps Agent investigation for the AWS side while you check Azure Monitor for errors on the Azure side. Then combine the findings into a unified root cause analysis. What's New: AWS DevOps Agent Integration The AWS MCP server now includes full integration with AWS DevOps Agent, which recently became generally available. This means Azure SRE Agent can start autonomous incident investigations on AWS infrastructure and get back root cause analyses and remediation recommendations — all within the same chat session. Available tools by category AgentSpace management Tool Description aws___list_agent_spaces Discover available AgentSpaces aws___get_agent_space Get AgentSpace details including ARN and configuration aws___create_agent_space Create a new AgentSpace for investigations Investigation lifecycle Tool Description aws___create_investigation Start an incident investigation (async, 5-8 min) aws___get_task Poll investigation task status aws___list_tasks List investigation tasks with filters aws___list_journal_records Read root cause analysis journal aws___list_executions List execution runs for a task aws___list_recommendations Get prioritized mitigation recommendations aws___get_recommendation Get full remediation specification Proactive evaluations Tool Description aws___start_evaluation Start an evaluation to find preventive recommendations aws___list_goals List evaluation goals and criteria Real-time chat Tool Description aws___create_chat Start a real-time chat session with AWS DevOps Agent aws___list_chats List recent chat sessions aws___send_message Send a message and get a streamed response Cross-Agent Investigation Workflow With the AWS MCP server connected, SRE Agent can run parallel investigations across both clouds. Here's how the cross-agent workflow works: Start an AWS investigation: Ask SRE Agent to create an AWS DevOps Agent investigation for the AWS-side symptoms Investigate Azure in parallel: While the AWS investigation runs (5-8 minutes), SRE Agent uses its native tools to check Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and resource health Read AWS results: When the investigation completes, SRE Agent reads the journal records and recommendations Correlate findings: SRE Agent combines both sets of findings into a single root cause analysis with remediation steps for both clouds Common cross-cloud scenarios: Azure app calling AWS services: Investigate Azure Function errors that correlate with AWS API failures Hybrid deployments: Check AWS EKS clusters alongside Azure AKS clusters during multi-cloud outages Data pipeline issues: Trace data flow across Azure Event Hubs and AWS Kinesis or SQS Agent-to-agent investigation: Start an AWS DevOps Agent investigation for the AWS side while Azure SRE Agent checks Azure resources in parallel Architecture The integration uses a stdio proxy architecture. SRE Agent spawns the proxy as a child process, and the proxy forwards requests to the AWS MCP endpoint: Azure SRE Agent | | stdio (local process) v mcp-proxy-for-aws (spawned via uvx) | | Authenticated HTTPS requests v AWS MCP Server (aws-mcp.<region>.api.aws) | |--- Authenticated AWS API calls --> AWS Services | (EC2, S3, CloudWatch, EKS, Lambda, etc.) | '--- DevOps Agent API calls ------> AWS DevOps Agent |-- AgentSpaces (workspaces) |-- Investigations (async root cause analysis) |-- Recommendations (remediation specs) '-- Chat sessions (real-time interaction) Troubleshooting Authentication and connectivity issues Error Cause Solution 403 Forbidden IAM user lacks MCP permissions Add aws-mcp:InvokeMcp , aws-mcp:CallReadOnlyTool to the IAM policy 401 Unauthorized Invalid or expired AWS credentials Rotate access keys and update the connector environment variables Proxy fails to start uvx not installed or not on PATH Install uv on the SRE Agent host Connection timeout Proxy cannot reach the AWS MCP endpoint Verify outbound HTTPS (port 443) is allowed to aws-mcp.<region>.api.aws Connector added but tools not available MCP connections are initialized at agent startup Redeploy or restart the agent service from the Azure portal Slow first connection uvx downloads ~89 dependencies on first run Wait up to 30 seconds for the initial connection API and permission issues Error Cause Solution AccessDenied on API call IAM user lacks the service-specific permission Add the required IAM action (e.g., ec2:DescribeInstances ) to the user's policy CallReadWriteTool denied Write permission not granted Add aws-mcp:CallReadWriteTool to the IAM policy Wrong region data Proxy configured for a different region Update the AWS_REGION metadata in the connector arguments, or specify the region in your query API not found Newly released or unsupported API Use aws___suggest_aws_commands to find the correct API name Verify the connection Test that the proxy can authenticate by opening a new chat session and asking: What AWS regions are available? If the agent returns a list of regions, the connection is working. If you see authentication errors, verify the IAM credentials and permissions from Step 1. Re-authorize the integration If you encounter persistent authentication issues: Navigate to the IAM console Select the user created in Step 1 Navigate to Security credentials > Access keys Deactivate or delete the old access key Create a new access key Update the connector environment variables in the SRE Agent portal with the new credentials Related content AWS MCP Server documentation MCP Proxy for AWS on GitHub AWS MCP Server tools reference AWS DevOps Agent documentation AWS DevOps Agent GA announcement AWS IAM documentation
Legacy SSRS reports after upgrading Azure DevOps Server 2020 to 2022 or 25H2
We are currently planning an upgrade from Azure DevOps Server 2020 to Azure DevOps Server 2022 or 25H2, and one of our biggest concerns is reporting. We understand that Microsoft’s recommended direction is to move to Power BI based on Analytics / OData. However, for on-prem environments with a large number of existing SSRS reports, rebuilding everything from scratch would require significant time and effort. Since Warehouse and Analysis Services are no longer available in newer versions, we would like to understand how other on-prem teams are handling legacy SSRS reporting during and after the upgrade. Have you rebuilt your reports in Power BI, moved to another reporting approach, or found a practical way to keep existing SSRS reports available during the transition? Any real-world experience, lessons learned, or recommended approaches would be greatly appreciated.Announcing general availability for the Azure SRE Agent
Today, we’re excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Azure SRE Agent— your AI‑powered operations teammate that helps organizations improve uptime, reduce incident impact, and cut operational toil by accelerating diagnosis and automating response workflows.Managing Multi‑Tenant Azure Resource with SRE Agent and Lighthouse
Azure SRE Agent is an AI‑powered reliability assistant that helps teams diagnose and resolve production issues faster while reducing operational toil. It analyzes logs, metrics, alerts, and deployment data to perform root cause analysis and recommend or execute mitigations with human approval. It’s capable of integrating with azure services across subscriptions and resource groups that you need to monitor and manage. Today’s enterprise customers live in a multi-tenant world, and there are multiple reasons to that due to acquisitions, complex corporate structures, managed service providers, or IT partners. Azure Lighthouse enables enterprise IT teams and managed service providers to manage resources across multiple azure tenants from a single control plane. In this demo I will walk you through how to set up Azure SRE agent to manage and monitor multi-tenant resources delegated through Azure Lighthouse. Navigate to the Azure SRE agent and select Create agent. Fill in the required details along with the deployment region and deploy the SRE agent. Once the deployment is complete, hit Set up your agent. Select the Azure resources you would like your agent to analyze like resource groups or subscriptions. This will land you to the popup window that allows you to select the subscriptions and resource groups that you would like SRE agent to monitor and manage. You can then select the subscriptions and resource groups under the same tenant that you want SRE agent to manage; Great, So far so good 👍 As a Managed Service Provider (MSP) you have multiple tenants that you are managing via Azure Lighthouse, and you need to have SRE agent access to those. So, to demo this will need to set up Azure Lighthouse with correct set of roles and configuration to delegate access to management subscription where the Centralized SRE agent is running. From Azure portal search Lighthouse. Navigate to the Lighthouse home page and select Manage your customers. On My customers Overview select Create ARM Template Provide a Name and Description. Select subscriptions on a Delegated scope. Select + Add authorization which will take you to Add authorization window. Select Principal type, I am selecting User for demo purposes. The pop-up window will allow Select users from the list. Select the checkbox next to the desired user who you want to delegate the subscription and hit Select Then select the Role that you would like to assign the user from the managing tenant to the delegated tenant and select add. You can add multiple roles by adding additional authorization to the selected user. This step is important to make sure the delegated tenant is assigned with the right role in order for SRE Agents to add it as Azure source. Azure SRE agent requires an Owner or User Administrator RBAC role to assign the subscription to the list of managed resources. If an appropriate role is not assigned, you will see an error when selecting the delegated subscriptions in SRE agent Managed resources. As per Lighthouse role support Owner role isn’t supported and User access Administrator role is supported, but only for limited purpose. Refer Azure Lighthouse documentation for additional information. If role is not defined correctly, you might see an error stating: 🛑Failed to add Role assignment “The 'delegatedRoleDefinitionIds' property is required when using certain roleDefinitionIds for authorization. To allow a principalId to assign roles to a managed identity in the customer tenant, set its roleDefinitionId to User Access Administrator. Download the ARM template and add specific Azure built-in roles that you want to grant in the delegatedRoleDefinitionIds property. You can include any supported Azure built-in role except for User Access Administrator or Owner. This example shows a principalId with User Access Administrator role that can assign two built in roles to managed identities in the customer tenant: Contributor and Log Analytics Contributor. { "principalId": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000", "principalIdDisplayName": "Policy Automation Account", "roleDefinitionId": "18d7d88d-d35e-4fb5-a5c3-7773c20a72d9", "delegatedRoleDefinitionIds": [ "b24988ac-6180-42a0-ab88-20f7382dd24c", "92aaf0da-9dab-42b6-94a3-d43ce8d16293" ] } In addition SRE agent would require certain roles at the managed identity level in order to access and operate on those services. Locate SRE agent User assigned managed identity and add roles to the service principal. For the demo purpose I am assigning Reader, Monitoring Reader, and Log Analytics Reader role. Here is the sample ARM template used for this demo. { "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2019-08-01/subscriptionDeploymentTemplate.json#", "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0", "parameters": { "mspOfferName": { "type": "string", "metadata": { "description": "Specify a unique name for your offer" }, "defaultValue": "lighthouse-sre-demo" }, "mspOfferDescription": { "type": "string", "metadata": { "description": "Name of the Managed Service Provider offering" }, "defaultValue": "lighthouse-sre-demo" } }, "variables": { "mspRegistrationName": "[guid(parameters('mspOfferName'))]", "mspAssignmentName": "[guid(parameters('mspOfferName'))]", "managedByTenantId": "6e03bca1-4300-400d-9e80-000000000000", "authorizations": [ { "principalId": "504adfc5-da83-47d4-8709-000000000000", "roleDefinitionId": "e40ec5ca-96e0-45a2-b4ff-59039f2c2b59", "principalIdDisplayName": "Pranab Mandal" }, { "principalId": "504adfc5-da83-47d4-8709-000000000000", "roleDefinitionId": "18d7d88d-d35e-4fb5-a5c3-7773c20a72d9", "delegatedRoleDefinitionIds": [ "b24988ac-6180-42a0-ab88-20f7382dd24c", "92aaf0da-9dab-42b6-94a3-d43ce8d16293" ], "principalIdDisplayName": "Pranab Mandal" }, { "principalId": "504adfc5-da83-47d4-8709-000000000000", "roleDefinitionId": "b24988ac-6180-42a0-ab88-20f7382dd24c", "principalIdDisplayName": "Pranab Mandal" }, { "principalId": "0374ff5c-5272-49fa-878a-000000000000", "roleDefinitionId": "acdd72a7-3385-48ef-bd42-f606fba81ae7", "principalIdDisplayName": "sre-agent-ext-sub1-4n4y4v5jjdtuu" }, { "principalId": "0374ff5c-5272-49fa-878a-000000000000", "roleDefinitionId": "43d0d8ad-25c7-4714-9337-8ba259a9fe05", "principalIdDisplayName": "sre-agent-ext-sub1-4n4y4v5jjdtuu" }, { "principalId": "0374ff5c-5272-49fa-878a-000000000000", "roleDefinitionId": "73c42c96-874c-492b-b04d-ab87d138a893", "principalIdDisplayName": "sre-agent-ext-sub1-4n4y4v5jjdtuu" } ] }, "resources": [ { "type": "Microsoft.ManagedServices/registrationDefinitions", "apiVersion": "2022-10-01", "name": "[variables('mspRegistrationName')]", "properties": { "registrationDefinitionName": "[parameters('mspOfferName')]", "description": "[parameters('mspOfferDescription')]", "managedByTenantId": "[variables('managedByTenantId')]", "authorizations": "[variables('authorizations')]" } }, { "type": "Microsoft.ManagedServices/registrationAssignments", "apiVersion": "2022-10-01", "name": "[variables('mspAssignmentName')]", "dependsOn": [ "[resourceId('Microsoft.ManagedServices/registrationDefinitions/', variables('mspRegistrationName'))]" ], "properties": { "registrationDefinitionId": "[resourceId('Microsoft.ManagedServices/registrationDefinitions/', variables('mspRegistrationName'))]" } } ], "outputs": { "mspOfferName": { "type": "string", "value": "[concat('Managed by', ' ', parameters('mspOfferName'))]" }, "authorizations": { "type": "array", "value": "[variables('authorizations')]" } } } Login to the customers tenant and navigate to the service provides from the Azure Portal. From the Service Providers overview screen, select Service provider offers from the left navigation pane. From the top menu, select the Add offer drop down and select Add via template. In the Upload Offer Template window drag and drop or upload the template file that was created in the earlier step and hit Upload. Once the file is uploaded, select Review + Create. This will take a few minutes to deploy the template, and a successful deployment page should be displayed. Navigate to Delegations from Lighthouse overview and validate if you see the delegated subscription and the assigned role. Once the Lighthouse delegation is set up sign in to the managing tenant and navigate to the deployed SRE agent. Navigate to Azure resources from top menu or via Settings > Managed resources. Navigate to Add subscriptions to select customers subscriptions that you need SRE agent to manage. Adding subscription will automatically add required permission for the agent. Once the appropriate roles are added, the subscriptions are ready for the agent to manage and monitor resources within them. Summary - Benefits This blog post demonstrates how Azure SRE Agent can be used to centrally monitor and manage Azure resources across multiple tenants by integrating it with Azure Lighthouse, a common requirement for enterprises and managed service providers operating in complex, multi-tenant environments. It walks through: Centralized SRE operations across multiple Azure tenants Secure, role-based access using delegated resource management Reduced operational overhead for MSPs and enterprise IT teams Unified visibility into resource health and reliability across customer environmentsThe Agent that investigates itself
Azure SRE Agent handles tens of thousands of incident investigations each week for internal Microsoft services and external teams running it for their own systems. Last month, one of those incidents was about the agent itself. Our KV cache hit rate alert started firing. Cached token percentage was dropping across the fleet. We didn't open dashboards. We simply asked the agent. It spawned parallel subagents, searched logs, read through its own source code, and produced the analysis. First finding: Claude Haiku at 0% cache hits. The agent checked the input distribution and found that the average call was ~180 tokens, well below Anthropic’s 4,096-token minimum for Haiku prompt caching. Structurally, these requests could never be cached. They were false positives. The real regression was in Claude Opus: cache hit rate fell from ~70% to ~48% over a week. The agent correlated the drop against the deployment history and traced it to a single PR that restructured prompt ordering, breaking the common prefix that caching relies on. It submitted two fixes: one to exclude all uncacheable requests from the alert, and the other to restore prefix stability in the prompt pipeline. That investigation is how we develop now. We rarely start with dashboards or manual log queries. We start by asking the agent. Three months earlier, it could not have done any of this. The breakthrough was not building better playbooks. It was harness engineering: enabling the agent to discover context as the investigation unfolded. This post is about the architecture decisions that made it possible. Where we started In our last post, Context Engineering for Reliable AI Agents: Lessons from Building Azure SRE Agent, we described how moving to a single generalist agent unlocked more complex investigations. The resolution rates were climbing, and for many internal teams, the agent could now autonomously investigate and mitigate roughly 50% of incidents. We were moving in the right direction. But the scores weren't uniform, and when we dug into why, the pattern was uncomfortable. The high-performing scenarios shared a trait: they'd been built with heavy human scaffolding. They relied on custom response plans for specific incident types, hand-built subagents for known failure modes, and pre-written log queries exposed as opaque tools. We weren’t measuring the agent’s reasoning – we were measuring how much engineering had gone into the scenario beforehand. On anything new, the agent had nowhere to start. We found these gaps through manual review. Every week, engineers read through lower-scored investigation threads and pushed fixes: tighten a prompt, fix a tool schema, add a guardrail. Each fix was real. But we could only review fifty threads a week. The agent was handling ten thousand. We were debugging at human speed. The gap between those two numbers was where our blind spots lived. We needed an agent powerful enough to take this toil off us. An agent which could investigate itself. Dogfooding wasn't a philosophy - it was the only way to scale. The Inversion: Three bets The problem we faced was structural - and the KV cache investigation shows it clearly. The cache rate drop was visible in telemetry, but the cause was not. The agent had to correlate telemetry with deployment history, inspect the relevant code, and reason over the diff that broke prefix stability. We kept hitting the same gap in different forms: logs pointing in multiple directions, failure modes in uninstrumented paths, regressions that only made sense at the commit level. Telemetry showed symptoms, but not what actually changed. We'd been building the agent to reason over telemetry. We needed it to reason over the system itself. The instinct when agents fail is to restrict them: pre-write the queries, pre-fetch the context, pre-curate the tools. It feels like control. In practice, it creates a ceiling. The agent can only handle what engineers anticipated in advance. The answer is an agent that can discover what it needs as the investigation unfolds. In the KV cache incident, each step, from metric anomaly to deployment history to a specific diff, followed from what the previous step revealed. It was not a pre-scripted path. Navigating towards the right context with progressive discovery is key to creating deep agents which can handle novel scenarios. Three architectural decisions made this possible – and each one compounded on the last. Bet 1: The Filesystem as the Agent's World Our first bet was to give the agent a filesystem as its workspace instead of a custom API layer. Everything it reasons over – source code, runbooks, query schemas, past investigation notes – is exposed as files. It interacts with that world using read_file, grep, find, and shell. No SearchCodebase API. No RetrieveMemory endpoint. This is an old Unix idea: reduce heterogeneous resources to a single interface. Coding agents already work this way. It turns out the same pattern works for an SRE agent. Frontier models are trained on developer workflows: navigating repositories, grepping logs, patching files, running commands. The filesystem is not an abstraction layered on top of that prior. It matches it. When we materialized the agent’s world as a repo-like workspace, our human "Intent Met" score - whether the agent's investigation addressed the actual root cause as judged by the on-call engineer - rose from 45% to 75% on novel incidents. But interface design is only half the story. The other half is what you put inside it. Code Repositories: the highest-leverage context Teams had prewritten log queries because they did not trust the agent to generate correct ones. That distrust was justified. Models hallucinate table names, guess column schemas, and write queries against the wrong cluster. But the answer was not tighter restriction. It was better grounding. The repo is the schema. Everything else is derived from it. When the agent reads the code that produces the logs, query construction stops being guesswork. It knows the exact exceptions thrown, and the conditions under which each path executes. Stack traces start making sense, and logs become legible. But beyond query grounding, code access unlocked three new capabilities that telemetry alone could not provide: Ground truth over documentation. Docs drift and dashboards show symptoms. The code is what the service actually does. In practice, most investigations only made sense when logs were read alongside implementation. Point-in-time investigation. The agent checks out the exact commit at incident time, not current HEAD, so it can correlate the failure against the actual diffs. That's what cracked the KV cache investigation: a PR broke prefix stability, and the diff was the only place this was visible. Without commit history, you can't distinguish a code regression from external factors. Reasoning even where telemetry is absent. Some code paths are not well instrumented. The agent can still trace logic through source and explain behavior even when logs do not exist. This is especially valuable in novel failure modes – the ones most likely to be missed precisely because no one thought to instrument them. Memory as a filesystem, not a vector store Our first memory system used RAG over past session learnings. It had a circular dependency: a limited agent learned from limited sessions and produced limited knowledge. Garbage in, garbage out. But the deeper problem was retrieval. In SRE Context, embedding similarity is a weak proxy for relevance. “KV cache regression” and “prompt prefix instability” may be distant in embedding space yet still describe the same causal chain. We tried re-ranking, query expansion, and hybrid search. None fixed the core mismatch between semantic similarity and diagnostic relevance. We replaced RAG with structured Markdown files that the agent reads and writes through its standard tool interface. The model names each file semantically: overview.md for a service summary, team.md for ownership and escalation paths, logs.md for cluster access and query patterns, debugging.md for failure modes and prior learnings. Each carry just enough context to orient the agent, with links to deeper files when needed. The key design choice was to let the model navigate memory, not retrieve it through query matching. The agent starts from a structured entry point and follows the evidence toward what matters. RAG assumes you know the right query before you know what you need. File traversal lets relevance emerge as context accumulates. This removed chunking, overlap tuning, and re-ranking entirely. It also proved more accurate, because frontier models are better at following context than embeddings are at guessing relevance. As a side benefit, memory state can be snapshotted periodically. One problem remains unsolved: staleness. When two sessions write conflicting patterns to debugging.md, the model must reconcile them. When a service changes behavior, old entries can become misleading. We rely on timestamps and explicit deprecation notes, but we do not have a systemic solution yet. This is an active area of work, and anyone building memory at scale will run into it. The sandbox as epistemic boundary The filesystem also defines what the agent can see. If something is not in the sandbox, the agent cannot reason about it. We treat that as a feature, not a limitation. Security boundaries and epistemic boundaries are enforced by the same mechanism. Inside that boundary, the agent has full execution: arbitrary bash, python, jq, and package installs through pip or apt. That scope unlocks capabilities we never would have built as custom tools. It opens PRs with gh cli, like the prompt-ordering fix from KV cache incident. It pushes Grafana dashboards, like a cache-hit-rate dashboard we now track by model. It installs domain-specific CLI tools mid-investigation when needed. No bespoke integration required, just a shell. The recurring lesson was simple: a generally capable agent in the right execution environment outperforms a specialized agent with bespoke tooling. Custom tools accumulate maintenance costs. Shell commands compose for free. Bet 2: Context Layering Code access tells the agent what a service does. It does not tell the agent what it can access, which resources its tools are scoped to, or where an investigation should begin. This gap surfaced immediately. Users would ask "which team do you handle incidents for?" and the agent had no answer. Tools alone are not enough. An integration also needs ambient context so the model knows what exists, how it is configured, and when to use it. We fixed this with context hooks: structured context injected at prompt construction time to orient the agent before it takes action. Connectors - what can I access? A manifest of wired systems such as Log Analytics, Outlook, and Grafana, along with their configuration. Repositories - what does this system do? Serialized repo trees, plus files like AGENTS.md, Copilot.md, and CLAUDE.md with team-specific instructions. Knowledge map - what have I learned before? A two-tier memory index with a top-level file linking to deeper scenario-specific files, so the model can drill down only when needed. Azure resource topology - where do things live? A serialized map of relationships across subscriptions, resource groups, and regions, so investigations start in the right scope. Together, these context hooks turn a cold start into an informed one. That matters because a bad early choice does not just waste tokens. It sends the investigation down the wrong trajectory. A capable agent still needs to know what exists, what matters, and where to start. Bet 3: Frugal Context Management Layered context creates a new problem: budget. Serialized repo trees, resource topology, connector manifests, and a memory index fill context fast. Once the agent starts reading source files and logs, complex incidents hit context limits. We needed our context usage to be deliberately frugal. Tool result compression via the filesystem Large tool outputs are expensive because they consume context before the agent has extracted any value from them. In many cases, only a small slice or a derived summary of that output is actually useful. Our framework exposes these results as files to the agent. The agent can then use tools like grep, jq, or python to process them outside the model interface, so that only the final result enters context. The filesystem isn't just a capability abstraction - it's also a budget management primitive. Context Pruning and Auto Compact Long investigations accumulate dead weight. As hypotheses narrow, earlier context becomes noise. We handle this with two compaction strategies. Context Pruning runs mid-session. When context usage crosses a threshold, we trim or drop stale tool calls and outputs - keeping the window focused on what still matters. Auto-Compact kicks in when a session approaches its context limit. The framework summarizes findings and working hypotheses, then resumes from that summary. From the user's perspective, there's no visible limit. Long investigations just work. Parallel subagents The KV cache investigation required reasoning along two independent hypotheses: whether the alert definition was sound, and whether cache behavior had actually regressed. The agent spawned parallel subagents for each task, each operating in its own context window. Once both finished, it merged their conclusions. This pattern generalizes to any task with independent components. It speeds up the search, keeps intermediate work from consuming the main context window, and prevents one hypothesis from biasing another. The Feedback loop These architectural bets have enabled us to close the original scaling gap. Instead of debugging the agent at human speed, we could finally start using it to fix itself. As an example, we were hitting various LLM errors: timeouts, 429s (too many requests), failures in the middle of response streaming, 400s from code bugs that produced malformed payloads. These paper cuts would cause investigations to stall midway and some conversations broke entirely. So, we set up a daily monitoring task for these failures. The agent searches for the last 24 hours of errors, clusters the top hitters, traces each to its root cause in the codebase, and submits a PR. We review it manually before merging. Over two weeks, the errors were reduced by more than 80%. Over the last month, we have successfully used our agent across a wide range of scenarios: Analyzed our user churn rate and built dashboards we now review weekly. Correlated which builds needed the most hotfixes, surfacing flaky areas of the codebase. Ran security analysis and found vulnerabilities in the read path. Helped fill out parts of its own Responsible AI review, with strict human review. Handles customer-reported issues and LiveSite alerts end to end. Whenever it gets stuck, we talk to it and teach it, ask it to update its memory, and it doesn't fail that class of problem again. The title of this post is literal. The agent investigating itself is not a metaphor. It is a real workflow, driven by scheduled tasks, incident triggers, and direct conversations with users. What We Learned We spent months building scaffolding to compensate for what the agent could not do. The breakthrough was removing it. Every prewritten query was a place we told the model not to think. Every curated tool was a decision made on its behalf. Every pre-fetched context was a guess about what would matter before we understood the problem. The inversion was simple but hard to accept: stop pre-computing the answer space. Give the model a structured starting point, a filesystem it knows how to navigate, context hooks that tell it what it can access, and budget management that keeps it sharp through long investigations. The agent that investigates itself is both the proof and the product of this approach. It finds its own bugs, traces them to root causes in its own code, and submits its own fixes. Not because we designed it to. Because we designed it to reason over systems, and it happens to be one. We are still learning. Staleness is unsolved, budget tuning remains largely empirical, and we regularly discover assumptions baked into context that quietly constrain the agent. But we have crossed a new threshold: from an agent that follows your playbook to one that writes the next one. Thanks to visagarwal for co-authoring this post.An AI led SDLC: Building an End-to-End Agentic Software Development Lifecycle with Azure and GitHub.
This is due to the inevitable move towards fully agentic, end-to-end SDLCs. We may not yet be at a point where software engineers are managing fleets of agents creating the billion-dollar AI abstraction layer, but (as I will evidence in this article) we are certainly on the precipice of such a world. Before we dive into the reality of agentic development today, let me examine two very different modules from university and their relevance in an AI-first development environment. Manual Requirements Translation. At university I dedicated two whole years to a unit called “Systems Design”. This was one of my favourite units, primarily focused on requirements translation. Often, I would receive a scenario between “The Proprietor” and “The Proprietor’s wife”, who seemed to be in a never-ending cycle of new product ideas. These tasks would be analysed, broken down, manually refined, and then mapped to some kind of early-stage application architecture (potentially some pseudo-code and a UML diagram or two). The big intellectual effort in this exercise was taking human intention and turning it into something tangible to build from (BA’s). Today, by the time I have opened Notepad and started to decipher requirements, an agent can already have created a comprehensive list, a service blueprint, and a code scaffold to start the process (*cough* spec-kit *cough*). Manual debugging. Need I say any more? Old-school debugging with print()’s and breakpoints is dead. I spent countless hours learning to debug in a classroom and then later with my own software, stepping through execution line by line, reading through logs, and understanding what to look for; where correlation did and didn’t mean causation. I think back to my year at IBM as a fresh-faced intern in a cloud engineering team, where around 50% of my time was debugging different issues until it was sufficiently “narrowed down”, and then reading countless Stack Overflow posts figuring out the actual change I would need to make to a PowerShell script or Jenkins pipeline. Already in Azure, with the emergence of SRE agents, that debug process looks entirely different. The debug process for software even more so… #terminallastcommand WHY IS THIS NOT RUNNING? #terminallastcommand Review these logs and surface errors relating to XYZ. As I said: breakpoints are dead, for now at least. Caveat – Is this a good thing? One more deviation from the main core of the article if you would be so kind (if you are not as kind skip to the implementation walkthrough below). Is this actually a good thing? Is a software engineering degree now worthless? What if I love printf()? I don’t know is my answer today, at the start of 2026. Two things worry me: one theoretical and one very real. To start with the theoretical: today AI takes a significant amount of the “donkey work” away from developers. How does this impact cognitive load at both ends of the spectrum? The list that “donkey work” encapsulates is certainly growing. As a result, on one end of the spectrum humans are left with the complicated parts yet to be within an agent’s remit. This could have quite an impact on our ability to perform tasks. If we are constantly dealing with the complex and advanced, when do we have time to re-root ourselves in the foundations? Will we see an increase in developer burnout? How do technical people perform without the mundane or routine tasks? I often hear people who have been in the industry for years discuss how simple infrastructure, computing, development, etc. were 20 years ago, almost with a longing to return to a world where today’s zero trust, globally replicated architectures are a twinkle in an architect’s eye. Is constantly working on only the most complex problems a good thing? At the other end of the spectrum, what if the performance of AI tooling and agents outperforms our wildest expectations? Suddenly, AI tools and agents are picking up more and more of today’s complicated and advanced tasks. Will developers, architects, and organisations lose some ability to innovate? Fundamentally, we are not talking about artificial general intelligence when we say AI; we are talking about incredibly complex predictive models that can augment the existing ideas they are built upon but are not, in themselves, innovators. Put simply, in the words of Scott Hanselman: “Spicy auto-complete”. Does increased reliance on these agents in more and more of our business processes remove the opportunity for innovative ideas? For example, if agents were football managers, would we ever have graduated from Neil Warnock and Mick McCarthy football to Pep? Would every agent just augment a ‘lump it long and hope’ approach? We hear about learning loops, but can these learning loops evolve into “innovation loops?” Past the theoretical and the game of 20 questions, the very real concern I have is off the back of some data shared recently on Stack Overflow traffic. We can see in the diagram below that Stack Overflow traffic has dipped significantly since the release of GitHub Copilot in October 2021, and as the product has matured that trend has only accelerated. Data from 12 months ago suggests that Stack Overflow has lost 77% of new questions compared to 2022… Stack Overflow democratises access to problem-solving (I have to be careful not to talk in past tense here), but I will admit I cannot remember the last time I was reviewing Stack Overflow or furiously searching through solutions that are vaguely similar to my own issue. This causes some concern over the data available in the future to train models. Today, models can be grounded in real, tested scenarios built by developers in anger. What happens with this question drop when API schemas change, when the technology built for today is old and deprecated, and the dataset is stale and never returning to its peak? How do we mitigate this impact? There is potential for some closed-loop type continuous improvement in the future, but do we think this is a scalable solution? I am unsure. So, back to the question: “Is this a good thing?”. It’s great today; the long-term impacts are yet to be seen. If we think that AGI may never be achieved, or is at least a very distant horizon, then understanding the foundations of your technical discipline is still incredibly important. Developers will not only be the managers of their fleet of agents, but also the janitors mopping up the mess when there is an accident (albeit likely mopping with AI-augmented tooling). An AI First SDLC Today – The Reality Enough reflection and nostalgia (I don’t think that’s why you clicked the article), let’s start building something. For the rest of this article I will be building an AI-led, agent-powered software development lifecycle. The example I will be building is an AI-generated weather dashboard. It’s a simple example, but if agents can generate, test, deploy, observe, and evolve this application, it proves that today, and into the future, the process can likely scale to more complex domains. Let’s start with the entry point. The problem statement that we will build from. “As a user I want to view real time weather data for my city so that I can plan my day.” We will use this as the single input for our AI led SDLC. This is what we will pass to promptkit and watch our app and subsequent features built in front of our eyes. The goal is that we will: - Spec-kit to get going and move from textual idea to requirements and scaffold. - Use a coding agent to implement our plan. - A Quality agent to assess the output and quality of the code. - GitHub Actions that not only host the agents (Abstracted) but also handle the build and deployment. - An SRE agent proactively monitoring and opening issues automatically. The end to end flow that we will review through this article is the following: Step 1: Spec-driven development - Spec First, Code Second A big piece of realising an AI-led SDLC today relies on spec-driven development (SDD). One of the best summaries for SDD that I have seen is: “Version control for your thinking”. Instead of huge specs that are stale and buried in a knowledge repository somewhere, SDD looks to make them a first-class citizen within the SDLC. Architectural decisions, business logic, and intent can be captured and versioned as a product evolves; an executable artefact that evolves with the project. In 2025, GitHub released the open-source Spec Kit: a tool that enables the goal of placing a specification at the centre of the engineering process. Specs drive the implementation, checklists, and task breakdowns, steering an agent towards the end goal. This article from GitHub does a great job explaining the basics, so if you’d like to learn more it’s a great place to start (https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-development-with-ai-get-started-with-a-new-open-source-toolkit/). In short, Spec Kit generates requirements, a plan, and tasks to guide a coding agent through an iterative, structured development process. Through the Spec Kit constitution, organisational standards and tech-stack preferences are adhered to throughout each change. I did notice one (likely intentional) gap in functionality that would cement Spec Kit’s role in an autonomous SDLC. That gap is that the implement stage is designed to run within an IDE or client coding agent. You can now, in the IDE, toggle between task implementation locally or with an agent in the cloud. That is great but again it still requires you to drive through the IDE. Thinking about this in the context of an AI-led SDLC (where we are pushing tasks from Spec Kit to a coding agent outside of my own desktop), it was clear that a bridge was needed. As a result, I used Spec Kit to create the Spec-to-issue tool. This allows us to take the tasks and plan generated by Spec Kit, parse the important parts, and automatically create a GitHub issue, with the option to auto-assign the coding agent. From the perspective of an autonomous AI-led SDLC, Speckit really is the entry point that triggers the flow. How Speckit is surfaced to users will vary depending on the organisation and the context of the users. For the rest of this demo I use Spec Kit to create a weather app calling out to the OpenWeather API, and then add additional features with new specs. With one simple prompt of “/promptkit.specify “Application feature/idea/change” I suddenly had a really clear breakdown of the tasks and plan required to get to my desired end state while respecting the context and preferences I had previously set in my Spec Kit constitution. I had mentioned a desire for test driven development, that I required certain coverage and that all solutions were to be Azure Native. The real benefit here compared to prompting directly into the coding agent is that the breakdown of one large task into individual measurable small components that are clear and methodical improves the coding agents ability to perform them by a considerable degree. We can see an example below of not just creating a whole application but another spec to iterate on an existing application and add a feature. We can see the result of the spec creation, the issue in our github repo and most importantly for the next step, our coding agent, GitHub CoPilot has been assigned automatically. Step 2: GitHub Coding Agent - Iterative, autonomous software creation Talking of coding agents, GitHub Copilot’s coding agent is an autonom ous agent in GitHub that can take a scoped development task and work on it in the background using the repository’s context. It can make code changes and produce concrete outputs like commits and pull requests for a developer to review. The developer stays in control by reviewing, requesting changes, or taking over at any point. This does the heavy lifting in our AI-led SDLC. We have already seen great success with customers who have adopted the coding agent when it comes to carrying out menial tasks to save developers time. These coding agents can work in parallel to human developers and with each other. In our example we see that the coding agent creates a new branch for its changes, and creates a PR which it starts working on as it ticks off the various tasks generated in our spec. One huge positive of the coding agent that sets it apart from other similar solutions is the transparency in decision-making and actions taken. The monitoring and observability built directly into the feature means that the agent’s “thinking” is easily visible: the iterations and steps being taken can be viewed in full sequence in the Agents tab. Furthermore, the action that the agent is running is also transparently available to view in the Actions tab, meaning problems can be assessed very quickly. Once the coding agent is finished, it has run the required tests and, even in the case of a UI change, goes as far as calling the Playwright MCP server and screenshotting the change to showcase in the PR. We are then asked to review the change. In this demo, I also created a GitHub Action that is triggered when a PR review is requested: it creates the required resources in Azure and surfaces the (in this case) Azure Container Apps revision URL, making it even smoother for the human in the loop to evaluate the changes. Just like any normal PR, if changes are required comments can be left; when they are, the coding agent can pick them up and action what is needed. It’s also worth noting that for any manual intervention here, use of GitHub Codespaces would work very well to make minor changes or perform testing on an agent’s branch. We can even see the unit tests that have been specified in our spec how been executed by our coding agent. The pattern used here (Spec Kit -> coding agent) overcomes one of the biggest challenges we see with the coding agent. Unlike an IDE-based coding agent, the GitHub.com coding agent is left to its own iterations and implementation without input until the PR review. This can lead to subpar performance, especially compared to IDE agents which have constant input and interruption. The concise and considered breakdown generated from Spec Kit provides the structure and foundation for the agent to execute on; very little is left to interpretation for the coding agent. Step 3: GitHub Code Quality Review (Human in the loop with agent assistance.) GitHub Code Quality is a feature (currently in preview) that proactively identifies code quality risks and opportunities for enhancement both in PRs and through repository scans. These are surfaced within a PR and also in repo-level scoreboards. This means that PRs can now extend existing static code analysis: Copilot can action CodeQL, PMD, and ESLint scanning on top of the new, in-context code quality findings and autofixes. Furthermore, we receive a summary of the actual changes made. This can be used to assist the human in the loop in understanding what changes have been made and whether enhancements or improvements are required. Thinking about this in the context of review coverage, one of the challenges sometimes in already-lean development teams is the time to give proper credence to PRs. Now, with AI-assisted quality scanning, we can be more confident in our overall evaluation and test coverage. I would expect that use of these tools alongside existing human review processes would increase repository code quality and reduce uncaught errors. The data points support this too. The Qodo 2025 AI Code Quality report showed that usage of AI code reviews increased quality improvements to 81% (from 55%). A similar study from Atlassian RovoDev 2026 study showed that 38.7% of comments left by AI agents in code reviews lead to additional code fixes. LLM’s in their current form are never going to achieve 100% accuracy however these are still considerable, significant gains in one of the most important (and often neglected) parts of the SDLC. With a significant number of software supply chain attacks recently it is also not a stretch to imagine that that many projects could benefit from "independently" (use this term loosely) reviewed and summarised PR's and commits. This in the future could potentially by a specialist/sub agent during a PR or merge to focus on identifying malicious code that may be hidden within otherwise normal contributions, case in point being the "near-miss" XZ Utils attack. Step 4: GitHub Actions for build and deploy - No agents here, just deterministic automation. This step will be our briefest, as the idea of CI/CD and automation needs no introduction. It is worth noting that while I am sure there are additional opportunities for using agents within a build and deploy pipeline, I have not investigated them. I often speak with customers about deterministic and non-deterministic business process automation, and the importance of distinguishing between the two. Some processes were created to be deterministic because that is all that was available at the time; the number of conditions required to deal with N possible flows just did not scale. However, now those processes can be non-deterministic. Good examples include IVR decision trees in customer service or hard-coded sales routines to retain a customer regardless of context; these would benefit from less determinism in their execution. However, some processes remain best as deterministic flows: financial transactions, policy engines, document ingestion. While all these flows may be part of an AI solution in the future (possibly as a tool an agent calls, or as part of a larger agent-based orchestration), the processes themselves are deterministic for a reason. Just because we could have dynamic decision-making doesn’t mean we should. Infrastructure deployment and CI/CD pipelines are one good example of this, in my opinion. We could have an agent decide what service best fits our codebase and which region we should deploy to, but do we really want to, and do the benefits outweigh the potential negatives? In this process flow we use a deterministic GitHub action to deploy our weather application into our “development” environment and then promote through the environments until we reach production and we want to now ensure that the application is running smoothly. We also use an action as mentioned above to deploy and surface our agents changes. In Azure Container Apps we can do this in a secure sandbox environment called a “Dynamic Session” to ensure strong isolation of what is essentially “untrusted code”. Often enterprises can view the building and development of AI applications as something that requires a completely new process to take to production, while certain additional processes are new, evaluation, model deployment etc many of our traditional SDLC principles are just as relevant as ever before, CI/CD pipelines being a great example of that. Checked in code that is predictably deployed alongside required services to run tests or promote through environments. Whether you are deploying a java calculator app or a multi agent customer service bot, CI/CD even in this new world is a non-negotiable. We can see that our geolocation feature is running on our Azure Container Apps revision and we can begin to evaluate if we agree with CoPilot that all the feature requirements have been met. In this case they have. If they hadn't we'd just jump into the PR and add a new comment with "@copilot" requesting our changes. Step 5: SRE Agent - Proactive agentic day two operations. The SRE agent service on Azure is an operations-focused agent that continuously watches a running service using telemetry such as logs, metrics, and traces. When it detects incidents or reliability risks, it can investigate signals, correlate likely causes, and propose or initiate response actions such as opening issues, creating runbook-guided fixes, or escalating to an on-call engineer. It effectively automates parts of day two operations while keeping humans in control of approval and remediation. It can be run in two different permission models: one with a reader role that can temporarily take user permissions for approved actions when identified. The other model is a privileged level that allows it to autonomously take approved actions on resources and resource types within the resource groups it is monitoring. In our example, our SRE agent could take actions to ensure our container app runs as intended: restarting pods, changing traffic allocations, and alerting for secret expiry. The SRE agent can also perform detailed debugging to save human SREs time, summarising the issue, fixes tried so far, and narrowing down potential root causes to reduce time to resolution, even across the most complex issues. My initial concern with these types of autonomous fixes (be it VPA on Kubernetes or an SRE agent across your infrastructure) is always that they can very quickly mask problems, or become an anti-pattern where you have drift between your IaC and what is actually running in Azure. One of my favourite features of SRE agents is sub-agents. Sub-agents can be created to handle very specific tasks that the primary SRE agent can leverage. Examples include alerting, report generation, and potentially other third-party integrations or tooling that require a more concise context. In my example, I created a GitHub sub-agent to be called by the primary agent after every issue that is resolved. When called, the GitHub sub-agent creates an issue summarising the origin, context, and resolution. This really brings us full circle. We can then potentially assign this to our coding agent to implement the fix before we proceed with the rest of the cycle; for example, a change where a port is incorrect in some Bicep, or min scale has been adjusted because of latency observed by the SRE agent. These are quick fixes that can be easily implemented by a coding agent, subsequently creating an autonomous feedback loop with human review. Conclusion: The journey through this AI-led SDLC demonstrates that it is possible, with today’s tooling, to improve any existing SDLC with AI assistance, evolving from simply using a chat interface in an IDE. By combining Speckit, spec-driven development, autonomous coding agents, AI-augmented quality checks, deterministic CI/CD pipelines, and proactive SRE agents, we see an emerging ecosystem where human creativity and oversight guide an increasingly capable fleet of collaborative agents. As with all AI solutions we design today, I remind myself that “this is as bad as it gets”. If the last two years are anything to go by, the rate of change in this space means this article may look very different in 12 months. I imagine Spec-to-issue will no longer be required as a bridge, as native solutions evolve to make this process even smoother. There are also some areas of an AI-led SDLC that are not included in this post, things like reviewing the inner-loop process or the use of existing enterprise patterns and blueprints. I also did not review use of third-party plugins or tools available through GitHub. These would make for an interesting expansion of the demo. We also did not look at the creation of custom coding agents, which could be hosted in Microsoft Foundry; this is especially pertinent with the recent announcement of Anthropic models now being available to deploy in Foundry. Does today’s tooling mean that developers, QAs, and engineers are no longer required? Absolutely not (and if I am honest, I can’t see that changing any time soon). However, it is evidently clear that in the next 12 months, enterprises who reshape their SDLC (and any other business process) to become one augmented by agents will innovate faster, learn faster, and deliver faster, leaving organisations who resist this shift struggling to keep up.
