Introducing Inside Microsoft Foundry: Quickstart 🎬
Discover Inside Microsoft Foundry: Quickstart, a new video series for developers building AI agents. Starting with "What does it really take to ship an AI agent?", the series explores real-world challenges such as model selection, grounding agents in data, evaluation, deployment, observability, and governance. Follow along as we show how the Microsoft Foundry ecosystem helps developers move from prototype to production, with new episodes released in the coming weeks.
Making Azure AI Foundry Agents Explainable — Knowledge Graphs + Source Attribution
90% of Azure AI demos work on stage — most never ship. The gap is architecture, not the model. I wrote up a field guide on taking Azure AI Foundry agents from POC to production, with knowledge graphs (GraphRAG) doing the grounding and source attribution. What the post covers Grounding with a knowledge graph — multi-hop retrieval + inline citations so every answer is traceable to a source (critical for regulated/medical use cases). Externalized state — keeping agent memory and session state outside the model. Identity at the boundary — Entra ID / RBAC instead of trusting the prompt. Observability & compliance — tracing, evaluation, and auditability. The stack — Azure AI Foundry + Model Context Protocol (MCP) + Azure Functions (Flex Consumption) + Azure OpenAI, from a real build (VeritasGraph medical MCP server). 📖 Full write-up: https://bibinprathap.com/blog/azure-ai-proof-of-concept-to-production ▶️ 6-min walkthrough: https://youtu.be/z-CPS5WUvyw?si=fmpo1RN28Bh9KbIb Questions for the community How are you grounding Foundry agents today — vector RAG, GraphRAG, or hybrid? Anyone combining knowledge graphs with MCP tools in Foundry? What worked / broke? For regulated domains, how are you handling source attribution and audit trails? Curious to compare notes — happy to share more detail on the GraphRAG retrieval design if useful.Join us for our MCP Live! — A free livestream covering all things MCP
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the open standard for connecting AI models to tools and data. It was first introduced to the world by Anthropic in November 2024, and is now the most widely adopted standard in the world of Generative AI. You can now use MCP servers to connect agents to your data sources across multiple clients: VS Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Copilot App, Goose, and many more. Plus, MCP is the most common way to build your own agents that connect to internal enterprise tools, like when using Microsoft agent-framework or Langchain. To celebrate the success of MCP and its rich ecosystem, we are hosting MCP Live! on September 9th, from 9AM to 1PM PT. We'll hear both from the teams at Microsoft that are implementing MCP, but also from core MCP maintainers and the global community of MCP developers. Register here: https://aka.ms/MCPLive/99/b Here's our current planned agenda: Time Topic Speakers 9 AM PT Welcome to MCP Live! Liam Hampton and Pamela Fox (Microsoft/GitHub), MCP advocates 9:05 AM State of MCP Caitie McCaffrey (Microsoft), MCP core maintainer 9:40 AM MCP: Server, Client & Protocol at GitHub Sam Morrow (GitHub), GitHub MCP server maintainer 10:05 AM A unified MCP layer with Toolboxes in Microsoft Foundry Viswajeeet Balaji (Microsoft), Principal Software Engineer 10:30 AM Building MCP servers in VS Code Harald Kirschner (Microsoft), VS Code Principal PM 11:15 AM MCP Authorization: DCR, EMA, and more! Den Delimarsky (Anthropic), Sam Bellen (Okta) 12:05 AM Building MCP apps with FastMCP Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), FastMCP maintainer 12:30 AM MCP Tasks, Events, Triggers Clare Liguori (Amazon), MCP core maintainer 12:45 AM Event-driven agents, powered by MCP Liam Hampton and Pamela Fox (Microsoft/GitHub), MCP advocates We're very excited to bring together so many folks working on both the MCP specification and on production MCP servers, so we can all learn about the latest MCP features and best practices together. Learn more MCP Brand new to MCP? We still want you to join! If you want, you can learn MCP fundamentals from our free resources: MCP-for-beginners : A step-by-step written tutorial covering all the MCP features Python + MCP series : Recordings of a 3-part livestream series focusing on building MCP servers with Python Meet the MCP community Want to meet the MCP community in person? We're also planning several IRL events: San Francisco (14 Sep 2026) Bengaluru (26 Sep 2026) Hope to see you in the live chat on September 9th!
One agent, three runtimes: porting a CSA agent to Microsoft Scout and Foundry Local
Most of my posts here are about Azure infrastructure lessons from customer engagements. This one is a little different — it's a real‑world engineering lesson from something I built to run my own practice. In my role as a Senior Cloud Solution Architect (CSA), I'm part of a grass-roots organic development team for an internal persona‑driven productivity agent called CSA‑Sherpa. It runs my daily rhythm: a morning briefing, a running logbook of wins and blockers, pipeline and timekeeping summaries, and reporting/exports. It started life in the GitHub Copilot CLI. But over the last few months two things changed the ground under it: Microsoft Scout arrived as a managed cloud agent with native tooling, scheduling, and memory; and Foundry Local made it realistic to run a capable model entirely on‑device on a Copilot+ PC's NPU — no cloud round‑trip at all. That raised a question I think a lot of people building agents will eventually ask: If I designed the framework well, can I change how the model runs without rewriting the agent? To find out, I stood the same agent up in three runtimes, then wrote a whitepaper and a comparison deck measuring what actually changed. This post explains: How one shared, deterministic core made three very different runtimes comparable What the three ports — Copilot CLI, Scout‑native, and Foundry Local (on‑device NPU) — actually took What the analysis showed, and a simple decision framework for which runtime to use when The part that stayed the same: a deterministic core The whole exercise only works because all three implementations load the same behavioral core: Agent definition — persona, behavioral rules, intent routing, workflow dispatch Instructions — conventions, session bootstrap, change‑management rules Skill library — one procedure file per workflow (morning briefing, logbook, pipeline, timekeeping, impact, ops, export…) A deterministic validation contract — schema, formatting, and privacy validators plus a post‑save enforcement chain That last point is the whole thesis: reliability belongs in code, not in the prompt. Rather than asking the model to "remember" to validate its output, a real gate (a validation step → a post‑save enforcement chain → index regeneration) enforces it every single run. This wasn't my idea in a vacuum — it follows the enterprise prompt‑engineering principles Kathiravan Thangavelu lays out in his article Prompt Engineering for Enterprise AI: Why Reliability Matters: keep deterministic logic in code, prefer schema‑driven / structured output over prompt‑enforced formatting, and replace "before you answer, verify that…" mental checklists with real machine validation. My validation gate is that principle in practice. And because that contract is identical across all three runtimes, I'm comparing three ways to execute one product — not three different products. The deterministic payoff: faster and cheaper Retrofitting those principles into the agent — moving work out of the model and into deterministic scripts — is the single change that paid off the most, on two axes at once: Faster. Letting code (not the model) gather and aggregate history cut the average model round‑trips per workflow from ~8.7 to ~5.5 — roughly a third fewer turns. Fewer turns means less waiting on generation and less back‑and‑forth to finish a task. Cheaper. The same change cut usage‑based cost ~24% — and, more importantly, held it flat as the logbook grew to hundreds of entries, because scripts carry the history the model used to re‑read every run. That's the quiet lesson: the reliability work I did for correctness turned out to be the same work that made the agent quicker and less expensive. Determinism isn't a tax on speed — here it bought all three. The work: three repositories, three runtimes Everything below the core — runtime, data access, governance, file layout — is where the effort went. 1 · Mainline — Copilot CLI + MCP. The upstream, most feature‑complete build. Runs as a primary agent in the GitHub Copilot CLI on Claude Opus 4.8; data services are discovered through MCP. It carries the heaviest governance: a Spec Kit layer (spec‑driven‑development agents, a constitution + templates, and 50+ per‑feature spec artifacts gated at PR time) plus an add‑on framework. The richest architecture — and the most complex to operate. 2 · Scout‑native. A thin wrapper loads the exact same core onto Microsoft Scout — again on Claude Opus 4.8 — but data access is re‑platformed onto Scout's native tooling instead of MCP subprocesses. No broker to configure; native tools negotiate their own auth. It adds two things the CLI can't do as cleanly: ✅ Scheduled automations — my morning briefing fires automatically on weekday mornings ✅ Cross‑session memory in place of hand‑off files The deterministic finalize gate stays fully intact. 3 · Foundry Local — on‑device NPU. The genuine outlier and the most involved port: a Python re‑implementation that runs the model — qwen2.5‑7b, an open ~7‑billion‑parameter model — 100% locally on the device's NPU (a Snapdragon X Elite Copilot+ PC) via Foundry Local's OpenAI‑compatible server. The agent loop, an MCP client, skill loading, and a distinct finalize pipeline all had to be rebuilt outside the CLI. The model never leaves the machine; only data connectors reach out when connected. The trade‑offs are real — modest throughput and a fixed context window — but so is the payoff: offline, private, near‑zero marginal cost. The effort This wasn't a weekend spike. Across the three code bases (plus a clean isolation clone I kept as an A/B baseline): ~340–380 commits per repository, three versions maintained in parallel 17 skills in each cloud build; 18 in the Foundry port ~37 scripts in the streamlined Scout build, up to ~97 in the governed Mainline build A Spec Kit governance layer with 50+ feature specs on Mainline A four‑part cost study and two written deliverables: an architecture whitepaper and a 20‑slide comparison deck The analysis and reporting The whitepaper and deck do two jobs. First, they document each runtime as a layered diagram — runtime, core, skills, scripting/validation, external services — so the differences are visible at a glance. Second, they convert the architecture fork into economics: a study that measured the actual token footprints of each repo and priced runs across billing models and hardware. The four dimensions: per‑skill cost, optimized‑vs‑out‑of‑the‑box, Copilot CLI vs Scout, and cloud vs local NPU. By the numbers The study priced measured token footprints at frontier‑model rates (treat the dollars as ±30% — the relative conclusions are far more robust than the absolute figures): Per skill: roughly $0.6–$1.4 per run usage‑based — or a single flat "premium request" under request‑based billing The determinism dividend: optimized, script‑driven skills cut model round‑trips ~8.7 → ~5.5 and usage‑based cost ~24% — and held cost flat as the logbook grew Scout vs CLI: Scout ran ~37% cheaper across a five‑command session and consumed none of the premium‑request allowance Cloud vs local: on‑device NPU inference came in 50–3,400× cheaper in cash than cloud — at the cost of throughput, context, and first‑pass reliability A full active day (~4 runs) landed around a few dollars usage‑based The headline isn't any single figure — it's the shape: cloud cents buy first‑pass reliability, on‑device near‑zero cost trades your time, and determinism makes either one cheaper and steadier. What held up The core is portable. The same agent, skills, and validation gate ran under all three runtimes. Good separation of concerns paid off. Determinism pays three ways — faster, cheaper, and more reliable (detailed above). It was the highest‑leverage change I made. Managed cloud wins the day job. Scout is the best daily driver: reliability gate intact, lower setup friction, scheduling + memory, and cheaper across a multi‑command session because it caches the bootstrap. On‑device is strategic — but reliability is the tax. Local NPU inference is dramatically cheaper in cash. We ran an in‑depth test pass across every function and closed the gaps it surfaced — yet the smaller model that makes Foundry Local possible still hallucinates and drops instructions often enough on the first pass to matter. Each re‑run is nearly free in dollars, but it costs real time to catch and correct. The winning pattern is hybrid. Draft and triage locally for ~nothing; escalate the correctness‑critical steps to cloud Opus 4.8, paying only where it buys first‑pass reliability. Three runtimes, side by side Figure: Three runtimes, one shared core. Only the top rows — runtime, model, data access, and governance — differ; the behavioral core, skill library, validation gate, and outputs are identical across all three. Capability Mainline (Copilot CLI) Scout‑native Foundry Local (NPU) Runtime Copilot CLI (cloud) Scout (cloud, managed) On‑device NPU Model Claude Opus 4.8 Claude Opus 4.8 qwen2.5‑7b (open, ~7B) Data access MCP Native tools MCP via local client Governance Spec Kit + PR gate Behavioral rules Behavioral rules Scheduling + memory ❌ ✅ ❌ Runs fully offline ❌ ❌ ✅ Marginal cost / run cloud per‑token cloud per‑token (cheaper/session) ≈ free Best for Framework development Daily production Offline / privacy / bulk When to use each Daily CSA workflows → Scout‑native. Managed, cheaper across a session, reliable, and it doesn't burn your Copilot request allowance. Building or versioning the framework → Mainline. Spec Kit governance and the add‑on system earn their keep here. Offline, air‑gapped, or sensitive data → Foundry Local. 100% on‑device inference. Bulk / high‑volume / non‑critical → Foundry Local. Zero marginal cost. Must be right on the first pass → Cloud Opus 4.8. The cents are worth it. Mixed, cost‑sensitive workload → Hybrid. Local draft → cloud escalate. Closing Thoughts The most useful reframe from this work: the three architectures aren't competitors — they're a portfolio. A managed cloud daily‑driver (Scout), a governed development platform (Mainline), and a sovereign on‑device runtime (Foundry Local). The job is to match the runtime to the task, not to crown one winner. And the same lesson that applies to Azure infrastructure applies to agents: build reliability into the system, not into good intentions. Because CSA‑Sherpa keeps its guarantees in code, I could change the entire execution model underneath it — cloud CLI, managed cloud, on‑device NPU — and the agent still behaved the same way. That portability is the dividend of a deterministic design. These workflows are genuinely complex, and that's exactly where the small model shows its limits: even after closing the gaps our testing surfaced, it still hallucinates and drops instructions often enough on the first pass to be a real cost. That's the honest trade‑off — near‑zero dollars, paid back in review‑and‑retry time — and it's why my recommendation lands on hybrid: let the small model draft where it's cheap and low‑risk, and escalate anything that has to be right the first time to cloud Opus 4.8. I use the agent in Microsoft Scout daily, as part of my personal production process. I did use AI to help draft and format this post — fittingly, the very agent it describes. The architecture, the analysis, and the conclusions are my own. Thanks for reading.
Azure AI Foundry Agent Unable to Use Credentials Stored in Key Vault Through Playwright MCP Tool
Hello everyone, I am trying to understand how Azure AI Foundry agents interact with Azure Key Vault when using custom MCP tools, and I would appreciate any guidance from the community. My Setup - Created an Azure AI Foundry agent. - Created an Azure Key Vault and configured all permissions according to Microsoft's official documentation. - Stored the required website credentials (username and password) in the Key Vault. - Deployed the official Playwright MCP Docker image. - Exposed the MCP server using ngrok and verified that the endpoint is accessible. - Connected the MCP endpoint as a Custom MCP Tool in Azure AI Foundry. - Performed all configuration through the Azure portal, Foundry UI, and Playground only (no SDK or custom application code involved). The Issue The agent can access and use the Playwright MCP tool. However, when I ask it to log in to a website using credentials that are already stored in Key Vault, it does not populate the username and password fields. My expectation was that the agent would be able to retrieve the secrets from Key Vault and provide them to the Playwright tool during execution. Questions Is there currently a supported mechanism for Azure AI Foundry agents to automatically retrieve Key Vault secrets and pass them to a Custom MCP tool? Does the Playwright MCP Docker image have any built-in integration with Azure Key Vault? When using only the Foundry UI (without SDK code), can a Foundry agent securely inject Key Vault secrets into MCP tool calls? Are additional configurations required beyond Key Vault permissions and agent connections? Has anyone successfully implemented a similar setup where a Foundry agent uses credentials stored in Key Vault to perform browser automation through Playwright MCP? Any clarification on the expected architecture and whether this scenario is currently supported in Azure AI Foundry would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.Learn how to use the four IQs: Web IQ, Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ
We just concluded Microsoft IQ Deep Dive with Python, a three-part livestream series all about Microsoft IQ. We showed how to use the four IQs to ground your AI applications and agents: Work IQ: user-specific retrieval of M365 data, like Teams chats, emails, and calendar events. Fabric IQ: retrieval of data stored in OneLake, via Fabric ontologies, graphs, and data agents. Web IQ: real-time web results with super low latency Foundry IQ: multi-source agentic retrieval on search indexes plus remote sources (including Web IQ, Work IQ, and Fabric IQ) The four IQs are all exposed as MCP endpoints, so you can easily integrate into your own agents, or add to your Foundry agents via the Foundry Toolbox. Check out our code samples for Python notebooks and agents that use each of the MCP servers and APIs. All of the materials from our series are available for you to keep learning from, and linked below: Video recordings of each stream PowerPoint slides that you can use for reviewing or even teaching the material to your own community An annotated write-up of each presentation, so you can quickly read through 🙋🏽♂️ Have follow up questions? Join the weekly Python+AI office hours on Foundry Discord. Microsoft IQ Deep Dive with Python: Foundry IQ 📺 Watch YouTube recording In the first session, we dived into Foundry IQ (Azure AI Search), exploring how it helps agents and applications work with curated knowledge and organizational context. We built knowledge bases in Python and connected them to multiple knowledge sources, including file knowledge sources, search indexes built from ingested data, and the Web IQ MCP server. Then we performed multi-source agentic retrieval on those knowledge bases, which executes queries in parallel and merges the results with state-of-the-art ranking models. Finally, we built agents in Python using Microsoft Agent Framework and grounded their responses in Foundry IQ results three different ways: a custom tool calling the knowledge base API, the knowledge base MCP endpoint, and a Foundry Toolbox. We deployed those agents to Foundry Agent Service as hosted agents and published one to Teams. 🖼️ Slides for this session 📝 Write-up for this session 💻 Code repository with examples: iqdeepdive Microsoft IQ Deep Dive with Python: Work IQ 📺 Watch YouTube recording In the second session, we focused on Work IQ and how it brings workplace context into AI-powered experiences. We compared Work IQ to Microsoft Graph, then explored all three protocols it speaks — A2A, MCP, and REST — with runnable Python notebooks for each. We walked through the 10 generic tools that Work IQ exposes over MCP, including ask, which calls Microsoft 365 Copilot directly, and do_action, the only write path. We also connected Work IQ to a Foundry IQ knowledge base as a knowledge source, so a single query returns a blended answer across indexed HR documents and live work context. Then we wired Work IQ into a Microsoft Agent Framework agent as an MCP tool, and finished with Agent 365 autopilots — agents that get their own Microsoft 365 identity, mailbox, and place in the org chart, and act as themselves rather than on behalf of you. A live demo showed the Work Mate autopilot reading its own mailbox in Teams and emailing a customer directly. 🖼️ Slides for this session 📝 Write-up for this session 💻 Code repository with examples: iqdeepdive Microsoft IQ Deep Dive with Python: Fabric IQ 📺 Watch YouTube recording In the final session, we explored Fabric IQ and how it connects AI experiences to structured business data stored in Microsoft Fabric's OneLake. We introduced the key components of Fabric IQ — ontologies, graphs, semantic models, and data agents — and showed how each one helps describe, organize, and reason over operational data. Ontologies provide a shared business vocabulary that maps entity types, properties, and relationships to actual OneLake data. Graphs offer dedicated graph database capabilities for queries requiring extensive relationship traversal. Semantic models expose Power BI analytics through DAX measures on star-schema tables. Data agents combine all of these behind a single conversational interface that selects the right source and query language automatically. For each component, we demonstrated the Ontology MCP server and Data Agent MCP server for agent integration, and showed how to add each as a knowledge source to Foundry IQ knowledge bases for multi-source retrieval. 🖼️ Slides for this session 📝 Write-up for this session 💻 Code repository with examples: iqdeepdiveMCP Server Authorization with Azure API Management: From Simple to Advanced
Why put API Management in front of your MCP servers The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has quickly become the standard way for AI agents, such as GitHub Copilot in VS Code, to reach external tools and data. As soon as an MCP server does anything meaningful, the same questions that govern any API resurface: who is allowed to call it, what are they allowed to do, and how do you enforce that consistently across many servers without rewriting each one. Azure API Management (APIM) answers those questions for MCP. It sits between the MCP client and the tool backend and applies the controls you already trust for REST APIs: identity validation, OAuth, rate limiting, IP filtering, and observability. Crucially, APIM speaks the MCP authorization specification, which is built on OAuth 2.1 and Protected Resource Metadata (PRM, RFC 9728). That means APIM can do more than block bad requests. It can actively drive an interactive sign-in from the IDE, so the user logs in with their own identity and the agent acts on their behalf. This article walks through a progression of authorization scenarios, each one building on the last: The simple case: validate a token and block everything else. Triggering an interactive sign-in from VS Code for an MCP server that APIM hosts from your own APIs. Going beyond "is this a tenant user" to "does this user have the right attribute" with Entra app roles. Fronting an existing external MCP server and letting it drive its own OAuth flow (GitHub as the example). Governing which tools of an existing MCP server an agent is actually allowed to invoke. APIM MCP capabilities and the basic authorization options API Management exposes MCP servers in two distinct ways, and the authorization story differs slightly for each. Expose a REST API as an MCP server. APIM takes an API it already manages and projects selected operations as MCP tools. You own the operations, so you choose exactly which ones become tools at configuration time. This is the right mode when the capability you want to expose is an API you control. Expose an existing MCP server (passthrough). APIM fronts a remote MCP-compatible server (LangChain, an Azure Function, GitHub's remote MCP server, your own container) and relays the MCP protocol to it. APIM governs access, but the upstream server still owns its tool catalog. On top of either mode, you have a spectrum of authorization options: Subscription keys for simple, machine-to-machine access where a shared secret in a header is acceptable. Token validation with Microsoft Entra ID, where APIM acts as the protected resource and verifies a bearer token on every call. Interactive OAuth 2.1 sign-in, where APIM advertises Protected Resource Metadata so an MCP client can discover the authorization server, log the user in, and retry with a user token. Authorization passthrough, where an external MCP server presents its own authorization challenge and APIM relays it faithfully so the client authenticates directly against the upstream's identity provider. The rest of the article works through these options in increasing order of capability. The example setup The walkthroughs in the first three scenarios all use the same backend so you can reproduce them without standing up anything of your own: the publicly available Star Wars API at Star Wars API. It is a simple, read-friendly REST API (characters, films, planets, starships, and so on) imported into API Management as a normal API and then projected as an MCP server. The reason this single API is enough to illustrate the whole progression is that, in API Management, one underlying API can back several independent MCP servers, each exposing a different slice of its operations. For example, you can create: A read-only MCP server that exposes only the GET operations, for agents that should be able to query data but never change it. A write-capable MCP server that exposes the POST, PUT, or DELETE operations, for trusted automation that is allowed to mutate state. Same backend API, two MCP servers, two different tool surfaces. Each of these servers is an independent resource in APIM, so each one can carry its own authorization. Both can require an authenticated user (Scenarios 1 and 2), and you can go further by protecting only the sensitive one: gate the write-capable server behind an Entra app role so that, even among authenticated users, only those who carry a specific claim can reach the mutating tools. That app-role mechanism is the subject of Scenario 3, and it composes naturally with the multi-server split described here. Registering the MCP API in Microsoft Entra ID Before any of the policies below can validate a token, you need an application registration in Microsoft Entra ID that represents the MCP API. This registration is what defines the audience and scope that tokens are issued for, and it is the source of the mcp-audience, mcp-scope, and (indirectly) mcp-client-id values that the policies reference. Create it once and reuse it across all the MCP servers in this article. In the Azure portal, open Microsoft Entra ID, then App registrations, then New registration. Name it (for example, star-wars-mcp-api), choose single-tenant, and register. Record the Application (client) ID and the Directory (tenant) ID. Open Expose an API and add an Application ID URI. Accept the default api://<app-id>. This URI is your token audience. Still under Expose an API, add a delegated scope named MCP.Access, set its consent display name and description, set the state to Enabled, and save. Authorize the client that will request the scope. Under Expose an API, select Add a client application and enter the client ID of the MCP client. For VS Code, this is the built-in Microsoft authentication client aebc6443-996d-45c2-90f0-388ff96faa56. Check the MCP.Access scope and save. These steps produce the four constants the validation policy needs: Named value Comes from Example entra-tenant-id The Directory (tenant) ID from step 1 11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111 mcp-audience The Application ID URI from step 2 api://22222222-2222-2222-2222-222222222222 mcp-scope The scope name from step 3 MCP.Access mcp-client-id The client ID of the calling app from step 4 aebc6443-996d-45c2-90f0-388ff96faa56 [!NOTE] mcp-client-id is the identity of the application calling the MCP server, not the MCP API itself. For VS Code it is the built-in Microsoft authentication client, and its value lands in the token's appid claim, which is why the validation policy lists it under client-application-ids. If your tenant blocks the first-party VS Code client, register your own public client application and use its client ID instead. [!TIP] For the privileged-access feature in Scenario 3, you will also declare an app role on this same registration. You do not need it yet, but it is convenient to know that all identity configuration for these servers lives on this one app registration. With that backend and structure in mind, the scenarios below build up the authorization model one capability at a time. Scenario 1: The simple case, validate the token and block unauthorized access The most basic protection is to require a valid Entra ID token on every MCP request and reject anything that fails validation. No interactive flow, no roles, just a gate. APIM does this with the validate-azure-ad-token policy. The policy checks the issuing tenant, the audience (your MCP API), the calling client application, and the required scope. Anything that does not satisfy all four is rejected with a 401. <policies> <inbound> <base /> <validate-azure-ad-token tenant-id="{{entra-tenant-id}}" header-name="Authorization" failed-validation-httpcode="401" failed-validation-error-message="Unauthorized. Access token is missing or invalid."> <client-application-ids> <application-id>{{mcp-client-id}}</application-id> </client-application-ids> <audiences> <audience>{{mcp-audience}}</audience> </audiences> <required-claims> <claim name="scp" match="any"> <value>{{mcp-scope}}</value> </claim> </required-claims> </validate-azure-ad-token> </inbound> <backend> <base /> </backend> <outbound> <base /> </outbound> <on-error> <base /> </on-error> </policies> The values in double braces are APIM named values: centralized constants, defined once and shared by every MCP server. They map directly to the four values produced by the Entra app registration in the example setup (entra-tenant-id, mcp-audience, mcp-scope, and mcp-client-id). Storing them as named values keeps the policy free of hardcoded identifiers and lets every server reuse the same configuration. This gets you a server that nobody can call without a properly minted token. What it does not do is help a fresh client obtain that token in the first place. That is the next scenario. Scenario 2: Driving an interactive sign-in from VS Code for an APIM-hosted MCP server When you expose one of your own APIs as an MCP server, you usually want a developer to open VS Code, connect to the server, and be prompted to sign in with their Microsoft account. No pre-shared key, no manual token handling. APIM achieves this by behaving as a well-mannered OAuth 2.1 protected resource. Using the Star Wars MCP server from the example setup, each selected operation becomes a tool the agent can call, so an agent can answer "which films featured the character named Leia" by calling the underlying API through APIM. How the sign-in flow works The protocol choreography is what turns a plain 401 into an interactive login: Two ingredients make this work: a 401 challenge that points to a metadata document, and the metadata document itself. The challenge: a 401 that points the client to its metadata Instead of a bare 401, APIM returns a WWW-Authenticate header carrying the URL of the server's Protected Resource Metadata. This is what tells the client "you need a token, and here is where to learn how to get one." Keeping this logic in a shared policy fragment means every MCP server reuses it. Notice the mcpResourceMetadataUrl reference in the fragment below. It is not hardcoded; it is a context variable that each MCP server sets in its own server-level policy before including this fragment (you will see that wiring in the per-server policy later in this scenario). The fragment simply reads whatever value the calling server provided. This indirection is what keeps the fragment pluggable: the same shared challenge-and-validate logic serves every MCP server, while each server supplies its own PRM URL. In most deployments the PRM endpoint is a single, dynamic one (built in the next section) that derives the resource from the request path, so the variable just carries that server's path. But because the URL is configurable per server rather than baked into the fragment, you retain flexibility for the cases that need it. <fragment> <!-- No token: challenge with the per-server PRM URL set by the caller --> <choose> <when condition="@(!context.Request.Headers.ContainsKey("Authorization"))"> <return-response> <set-status code="401" reason="Unauthorized" /> <set-header name="WWW-Authenticate" exists-action="override"> <value>@("Bearer resource_metadata=\"" + (string)context.Variables.GetValueOrDefault("mcpResourceMetadataUrl", "") + "\"")</value> </set-header> </return-response> </when> </choose> <!-- Token present: validate against shared named values --> <validate-azure-ad-token tenant-id="{{entra-tenant-id}}" header-name="Authorization" failed-validation-httpcode="401" failed-validation-error-message="Unauthorized. Access token is missing or invalid."> <client-application-ids> <application-id>{{mcp-client-id}}</application-id> </client-application-ids> <audiences> <audience>{{mcp-audience}}</audience> </audiences> <required-claims> <claim name="scp" match="any"> <value>{{mcp-scope}}</value> </claim> </required-claims> </validate-azure-ad-token> </fragment> Creating the /.well-known PRM endpoint in APIM with a policy This is the part that often surprises people: APIM itself serves the metadata document. There is no separate identity service to stand up. You publish one small anonymous API at the service root that answers GET /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/*, derives the resource value from the requested path, and returns a JSON document pointing at Microsoft Entra ID as the authorization server. Create a blank HTTP API named well-known with an empty API URL suffix so it resolves at the service root, add a GET operation with the template /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/*, clear the subscription requirement so it is reachable anonymously, and apply this policy: <policies> <inbound> <base /> <!-- Build the resource URL from the requested PRM sub-path --> <set-variable name="resourceUrl" value="@{ var prefix = "/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource"; var path = context.Request.OriginalUrl.Path; var resourcePath = path.Length > prefix.Length ? path.Substring(prefix.Length) : ""; return "https://" + context.Request.OriginalUrl.Host + resourcePath; }" /> <return-response> <set-status code="200" reason="OK" /> <set-header name="Content-Type" exists-action="override"> <value>application/json</value> </set-header> <set-body>@{ return new JObject( new JProperty("resource", (string)context.Variables["resourceUrl"]), new JProperty("authorization_servers", new JArray( "https://login.microsoftonline.com/{{entra-tenant-id}}/v2.0")), new JProperty("scopes_supported", new JArray("{{mcp-prm-scope}}")), new JProperty("bearer_methods_supported", new JArray("header")) ).ToString(); }</set-body> </return-response> </inbound> <backend> <base /> </backend> <outbound> <base /> </outbound> <on-error> <base /> </on-error> </policies> The {{mcp-prm-scope}} named value populates the scopes_supported array of the metadata document. It tells the client which delegated scope to request when it goes to the authorization server, so it must be the fully qualified scope value: the token audience (the Application ID URI from the app registration) followed by the scope name. With the example values that is api://22222222-2222-2222-2222-222222222222/MCP.Access. In other words, it is the combination of the mcp-audience and mcp-scope values defined in the example setup. Named value Value to set Example mcp-prm-scope <mcp-audience>/<mcp-scope> api://22222222-2222-2222-2222-222222222222/MCP.Access [!NOTE] Keep mcp-prm-scope in sync with the scope the validation fragment requires. The PRM document advertises this scope so the client requests it, and validate-azure-ad-token then checks for it in the scp claim. A mismatch means the client obtains a token without the scope APIM expects, and validation fails. Because the policy builds the resource value from the request path, this single endpoint serves metadata for every MCP server you ever add. The Star Wars server, a future inventory server, and anything else all share it. Wiring it onto the MCP server Each MCP server only needs to declare its own metadata URL and include the shared fragment: <policies> <inbound> <base /> <set-variable name="mcpResourceMetadataUrl" value="https://apim-contoso-mcp.azure-api.net/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/star-wars-mcp/mcp" /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-entra-auth" /> </inbound> <backend> <base /> </backend> <outbound> <base /> </outbound> <on-error> <base /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-auth-challenge-onerror" /> </on-error> </policies> On the VS Code side, the configuration is deliberately plain. With no subscription-key header present, the client falls straight into the OAuth flow: { "servers": { "star-wars-mcp": { "url": "https://apim-contoso-mcp.azure-api.net/star-wars-mcp/mcp", "type": "http" } } } Restart the server in VS Code, and it detects the 401, reads the metadata, opens a browser sign-in, requests consent on first use, and then loads the tools using the user's token. [!CAUTION] Do not read the response body with context.Response.Body inside MCP server policies. It forces response buffering and breaks the MCP streaming transport. If global diagnostic logging is enabled, set the Frontend Response payload bytes to log to 0 at the All APIs scope. Scenario 3: Beyond tenant membership, authorize on a user attribute with app roles Validating a token confirms the caller is a signed-in user in your tenant with the right scope. That is often not enough. Some MCP servers expose sensitive tools that only a subset of users should reach. You want to express "this user is not only part of the tenant, but has a specific attribute that permits this server." Microsoft Entra app roles are the optimal mechanism for this. You declare a role on the MCP API app registration, assign it to specific users or to a security group, and Entra ID emits a roles claim in the access token whenever your API is the audience. APIM then authorizes on that claim. App roles beat the groups claim here because they avoid the group overage problem, they are scoped to the application, and they travel with the app. Declaring and assigning the role On the MCP API app registration, under App roles, create a role: Setting Value Display name Privileged Access Allowed member types Users/Groups Value Privileged.Access Description Access to privileged MCP servers Then, on the matching enterprise application, under Users and groups, assign the users (or, better, a security group) to the Privileged Access role. The Value field is the exact string that lands in the token roles claim, so it cannot contain spaces. [!TIP] Keep User assignment required set to No on the enterprise application. Unassigned users still obtain a valid token with the MCP.Access scope and keep access to the non-privileged servers. They simply do not carry the roles claim, so the privileged servers reject them. Enforcing the claim in the per-server policy The shared mcp-entra-auth fragment is used by every server, so the role requirement must not live there. Place the check in the privileged server's own policy, right after the fragment include. The token is already validated at that point, so this step is pure authorization. Because the caller is authenticated but not authorized, return 403, not 401, and do not emit a challenge: re-authenticating will not grant a role the user does not have. <policies> <inbound> <base /> <set-variable name="mcpResourceMetadataUrl" value="https://apim-contoso-mcp.azure-api.net/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/star-wars-mcp/mcp" /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-entra-auth" /> <!-- Privileged guardrail: require the Privileged.Access app role --> <choose> <when condition="@(!context.Request.Headers.GetValueOrDefault("Authorization","").Replace("Bearer ","").AsJwt().Claims.GetValueOrDefault("roles", new string[0]).Contains("Privileged.Access"))"> <return-response> <set-status code="403" reason="Forbidden" /> <set-header name="Content-Type" exists-action="override"> <value>application/json</value> </set-header> <set-body>{"error":"forbidden","message":"You lack the Privileged.Access role required for this MCP server."}</set-body> </return-response> </when> </choose> </inbound> <backend> <base /> </backend> <outbound> <base /> </outbound> <on-error> <base /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-auth-challenge-onerror" /> </on-error> </policies> One operational detail worth calling out: app-role assignments only appear in newly issued tokens. A user who is granted the role after they signed in must obtain a fresh token. In VS Code, run MCP: Reset Cached Tokens (or sign out of the Microsoft account from the Accounts menu), then restart the server and sign in again. You can confirm the result by pasting the access token into https://jwt.ms and checking for "roles": ["Privileged.Access"]. Scenario 4: Fronting an existing external MCP server that drives its own sign-in So far APIM has been the authorization resource. But many valuable MCP servers already exist and run their own identity. GitHub publishes a remote MCP server with dozens of tools, and it authenticates users against GitHub's own OAuth authorization server. You do not want to re-implement that. You want APIM to govern access (rate limits, IP rules, logging, a single managed endpoint) while letting the upstream own the login. This is the "expose an existing MCP server" passthrough mode. When you register GitHub's remote MCP server behind APIM, the gateway relays the upstream's own authorization challenge. The client never authenticates against Entra here. It authenticates directly against GitHub. The flow, confirmed by probing the gateway: A call to the APIM endpoint with no token returns GitHub's own 401 with a WWW-Authenticate header, relayed through APIM. The Protected Resource Metadata that GitHub serves advertises authorization_servers: ["https://github.com/login/oauth"], so the client knows to log in at GitHub. The PRM resource reflects the APIM host, because GitHub builds it from the forwarded Host header. The client trusts the APIM endpoint while still logging in at GitHub. VS Code completes the GitHub sign-in and the full tool catalog loads. In the proof of concept this surfaced all 47 GitHub tools through the single APIM endpoint. The client configuration is again just a URL pointing at APIM: { "servers": { "github-via-apim": { "url": "https://apim-contoso-mcp.azure-api.net/github-mcp/mcp", "type": "http" } } } The key insight is that APIM transparently relays the backend's authentication challenge. GitHub remains the authorization server, GitHub tolerates being fronted by APIM, and you get a governed, centrally managed entry point without owning the identity flow. [!NOTE] Passthrough only relays what the upstream advertises. If the backend's PRM resource value and the actual MCP transport endpoint differ by a path segment, some clients fall back to deriving the metadata location from the server URL and can miss it. When you onboard a custom self-authenticating server, verify that the resource it advertises matches the exact URL the client connects to. Scenario 5: Restricting which tools of an existing MCP server an agent may call Passthrough raises a governance question that token validation alone cannot answer. A developer may legitimately have permission to merge a pull request through GitHub, but you may not want their AI agent to perform that action autonomously. You want to allow the read and discovery tools while blocking the destructive write tools, at the gateway, regardless of what the client tries. What is and is not possible for an external server It is important to be precise here, because the capability differs from the REST-as-MCP mode: For a REST-API-exposed-as-MCP server, you pick which operations become tools at creation time. That is native tool selection and the cleanest possible filter. For an existing/external MCP server, APIM does not enumerate the upstream's tools. The portal Tools blade explicitly states that tools are not visible for external MCP servers, and there is no allow-list property for them. APIM also cannot safely rewrite the tools/list response, because reading the response body breaks the streaming transport and the list may arrive as text/event-stream. What APIM can do reliably, and server-agnostically, is block the invocation. Every tool call arrives as a JSON-RPC tools/call request in the request body, which APIM can inspect safely. The deny-listed tools remain visible in the catalog, but any attempt to invoke one is intercepted at the gateway and returned a JSON-RPC error before it ever reaches the upstream. The reusable deny-list fragment The block is driven by a per-server named value (a comma-separated list of tool names), so the same fragment governs every external server. Only the named value changes. <!-- Fragment: mcp-tool-filter (include after the auth fragment) --> <fragment> <choose> <when condition="@(context.Request.Body != null)"> <set-variable name="mcpMethod" value="@{ try { var body = context.Request.Body.As<JObject>(preserveContent: true); return (string)body?["method"] ?? string.Empty; } catch { return string.Empty; } }" /> <choose> <when condition="@(((string)context.Variables["mcpMethod"]).Equals("tools/call", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))"> <set-variable name="mcpToolName" value="@{ var body = context.Request.Body.As<JObject>(preserveContent: true); return (string)body?["params"]?["name"] ?? string.Empty; }" /> <!-- mcpBlockedTools is a comma-separated deny-list set by the per-server policy before this include --> <set-variable name="mcpBlocked" value="@{ var tool = ((string)context.Variables["mcpToolName"]).Trim().ToLowerInvariant(); var deny = ((string)context.Variables.GetValueOrDefault("mcpBlockedTools", "")).ToLowerInvariant().Split(',').Select(t => t.Trim()); return deny.Contains(tool); }" /> <choose> <when condition="@((bool)context.Variables["mcpBlocked"])"> <return-response> <set-status code="200" reason="OK" /> <set-header name="Content-Type" exists-action="override"> <value>application/json</value> </set-header> <set-body>@{ var id = "null"; try { var body = context.Request.Body.As<JObject>(preserveContent: true); id = body?["id"]?.ToString(Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.None) ?? "null"; } catch {} return "{\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"id\":" + id + ",\"error\":{\"code\":-32602,\"message\":\"Unknown tool: " + ((string)context.Variables["mcpToolName"]) + "\"}}"; }</set-body> </return-response> </when> </choose> </when> </choose> </when> </choose> </fragment> The deny-list itself lives in a named value, one per server: APIM named value. Comma-separated, case-insensitive. mcp-blocked-tools-github = merge_pull_request,create_repository,delete_repository,push_files,create_or_update_file,issue_write,label_write # <policies> <inbound> <base /> <set-variable name="mcpResourceMetadataUrl" value="https://apim-contoso-mcp.azure-api.net/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/github-mcp/mcp" /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-entra-auth" /> <set-variable name="mcpBlockedTools" value="{{mcp-blocked-tools-github}}" /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-tool-filter" /> </inbound> <backend> <base /> </backend> <outbound> <base /> </outbound> <on-error> <base /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-auth-challenge-onerror" /> </on-error> </policies> Generic per-server pattern: mcp-blocked-tools-<server> = <comma,separated,tool,names> Wiring it onto the GitHub passthrough server <policies> <inbound> <base /> <set-variable name="mcpResourceMetadataUrl" value="https://apim-contoso-mcp.azure-api.net/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/github-mcp/mcp" /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-entra-auth" /> <set-variable name="mcpBlockedTools" value="{{mcp-blocked-tools-github}}" /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-tool-filter" /> </inbound> <backend> <base /> </backend> <outbound> <base /> </outbound> <on-error> <base /> <include-fragment fragment-id="mcp-auth-challenge-onerror" /> </on-error> </policies> Now when the agent tries to merge a pull request, the gateway returns a clean -32602 Unknown tool error and the upstream is never touched. Read and discovery tools continue to work. The tool still appears in the client's catalog. Adding governance for another external server is just one more named value plus the same fragment include. No new policy logic. Key takeaways API Management turns MCP servers into governed resources, applying the same identity, traffic, and observability controls you already use for APIs. Start simple with validate-azure-ad-token to gate access, then graduate to a full interactive sign-in by serving Protected Resource Metadata from a single APIM policy. You can publish multiple MCP servers from one underlying API, for example a read-only server and a read-write server, by selecting different operations. App roles let you authorize on a user attribute, not just tenant membership, and the check belongs in the per-server policy so shared logic stays clean. For existing external servers, APIM relays the upstream's own OAuth flow, so a server like GitHub keeps owning its identity while you keep central governance. When an external server's full tool surface is too broad, APIM can block specific tool invocations at the gateway with a reusable, named-value-driven policy, so a user's agent cannot perform actions the user could perform manually. References About MCP servers in Azure API Management Secure access to MCP servers in API Management Expose REST API in API Management as an MCP server Expose and govern an existing MCP server validate-azure-ad-token policy reference Policy fragments in API Management RFC 9728: OAuth 2.0 Protected Resource Metadata MCP authorization specification Star Wars API (example backend) MCP for BeginnersBuilding Agents in Production with Toolbox, Skills, and Tool Search
If you are shipping AI agents beyond a demo, you have felt the pain: every agent needs the same tools, each with its own authentication, and the tool list keeps growing until your prompt is bloated and the model picks the wrong one. On 22 July 2026 at 5:00 PM BST, the Microsoft Foundry community is running a 40-minute Discord round table to talk about exactly this, and to gather your feedback on three capabilities built to fix it: Toolbox, Skills, and Tool Search. This is a discussion, not a slideshow. Bring your real projects, including tool sprawl, duplicated skills, and authentication headaches, and help shape where these features go next. Join us in the Microsoft Foundry Discord community. Event at a glance What: Microsoft Foundry Discord Community Round Table: Building Agents in Production with Foundry Toolbox, Skills, and Tool Search When: 22 July 2026, 5:00 PM BST (40 minutes) Where: https://aka.ms/foundry/discord Event Link https://discord.gg/Z8JZsrP5P5?event=1527379174061379584 Format: Interactive discussion with voice and chat, live polls, and a short prioritisation exercise Who it's for: AI engineers and developers building and scaling agents in production Opening question we'll start with: "As your agents grow, how do you decide which tools to give them, and how do they pick the right one at runtime?" The problem: agents don't scale by hard-wiring every tool When several agents, or a mix of Foundry hosted agents, Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, and Copilot SDK apps, need the same governed set of tools, you do not want to re-wire those tools and their authentication into every one. Two things break as you grow: Integration sprawl: the same tool gets wired, authenticated, and versioned separately in every agent. Tool overload: sending every tool definition to the model on every turn is slow, expensive, and hurts selection accuracy. The pattern that scales: package the tools once behind a single versioned, governed MCP endpoint, make them discoverable, and let every runtime consume them from the same URL. That is what Toolbox, Skills, and Tool Search deliver together. The three concepts we'll discuss Toolbox: build once, govern centrally, consume anywhere A Toolbox is a reusable, centrally managed bundle of tools exposed through a single MCP-compatible endpoint. Because it is a managed resource, you can add, remove, or reconfigure tools without changing agent code because every agent connects to the same endpoint. Immutable versioning gives you safe, atomic rollouts: build and test a new version on its pinned URL, then promote it to default, and every consumer picks it up with no redeployment. Skills: reusable, composable capabilities A Skill is a reusable, published set of behavioural instructions (a SKILL.md file following the open Agent Skills spec) that is registered once and reused across toolboxes and agents, for example, "summarize document" or "create calendar event". In a toolbox, a skill is not a callable tool: it surfaces as an MCP Resource on the same endpoint, so clients discover and read it with plain resources/list and resources/read, with no Foundry SDK required. Tool Search: runtime discovery instead of hard-wiring A real toolbox can hold dozens or hundreds of tools. Tool Search keeps that cheap for the model through progressive disclosure: instead of listing every tool, Foundry shows the model just two meta-tools, tool_search and call_tool, plus any pinned tools. The model searches for a capability by intent, Foundry ranks the toolbox's tools by match on name and description, and returns only the hits. The prompt stays small no matter how many tools the toolbox holds. How they fit together: Skills and tools live in a Toolbox; Tool Search lets agents scale to many tools without prompt bloat or manual wiring. You manage all of it from the Foundry portal or the Foundry Toolkit extension in VS Code. The scenario we'll walk through A user asks an agent to "summarize this email and schedule a follow-up." The agent uses Tool Search to find the right tools ("email summarization" and "calendar scheduling") from a shared Toolbox, chains them, and returns a result with no per-agent integration and no hard-coded tool list. Discussion prompt: "At what point does the number of tools in your agent start to hurt, and would Tool Search help?" A peek at the code (so you arrive ready) The full, runnable walkthrough lives in the Mastering Foundry Toolbox notebook in the microsoft-foundry/forgebook repo. The core spine is short. First, build a versioned toolbox from typed tool objects plus an optional list of skills: # Build an immutable toolbox version from typed tools + skills version = project.toolboxes.create_version( name=TOOLBOX_NAME, description="Search, code, knowledge, and connection-backed tools.", tools=tools, # e.g. WebSearchToolboxTool(...), AzureAISearchToolboxTool(...) skills=skills or None, # ToolboxSkillReference(name=..., version=...) - SEPARATE from tools ) print(f"Created {TOOLBOX_NAME} version {version.version}") Then turn the same tools into a search-first toolbox by adding the Tool Search meta-tool and pinning only your one or two hottest tools: from azure.ai.projects.models import ToolboxSearchPreviewToolboxTool, ToolConfig # Pin the hottest tool so it's always exposed; everything else is search-gated. tool_configs = {"web_search": ToolConfig(pin=True)} search_version = project.toolboxes.create_version( name=TOOLBOX_NAME, tools=tools + [ToolboxSearchPreviewToolboxTool(tool_configs=tool_configs)], skills=skills or None, ) Every consumer talks to the same MCP endpoint: one URL, any framework: # The default (promoted) version is served from one stable consumer URL def consumer_mcp_url(name): return f"{PROJECT_ENDPOINT.rstrip('/')}/toolboxes/{name}/mcp?api-version=v1" # Microsoft Agent Framework speaks MCP natively - just point it at the URL. # LangGraph (AzureAIProjectToolbox) and the GitHub Copilot SDK consume the same endpoint. How Toolbox simplifies the auth and identity flow This is one of the most important things to understand before you scale agents, and it is a great topic to bring questions on. A toolbox tool reaches a downstream system through a project connection, and the connection's authentication type decides whose identity is used. Get this right once and every consumer inherits correct, least-privilege access automatically, without writing OAuth or token-exchange plumbing in your agent code. Running a toolbox behind a hosted agent puts two identities in play, and the platform wires them together for you: Agent -> Toolbox (the trust boundary). The hosted agent authenticates to the toolbox MCP endpoint with its own agent identity, which holds the Foundry user role on the project. If the agent doesn't have access, the toolbox rejects the agent. This gates access to the toolbox itself, independent of any single tool. Toolbox -> Tool (the end-user passthrough). For oauth2 authentication, the agent forwards the caller's end-user Entra token, and the toolbox uses that token (on-behalf-of) to reach the downstream tool. The tool then acts on behalf of the real end user, providing per-user, least-privilege access with correct downstream audit. For non-passthrough authentication types (none, custom-keys, project-managed-identity, and agentic-identity), the toolbox authenticates using the connection's configured identity, and the agent never sees the secret. That is the "better-together" story: a stable, governable managed identity to the toolbox, plus true end-user identity on the downstream data call. What we'll cover in the 40 minutes https://discord.gg/Z8JZsrP5P5?event=1527379174061379584 Welcome & framing (0:00-0:08): what Toolbox, Skills, and Tool Search are, and how they fit together. Scenario walkthrough (0:08-0:13): the "summarize email, schedule follow-up" flow, end to end. Use cases & opportunities (0:13-0:22): which capabilities you would package as reusable Skills, how many tools your agents carry, and where Tool Search would help. Trust, security & governance (0:22-0:31): what you are comfortable exposing through a shared endpoint, how to scope which tools an agent may discover, authentication models, and the observability you need. Developer experience feedback (0:31-0:36): your biggest adoption blockers, missing docs, and the SDK samples and end-to-end demos you would prioritise. Prioritisation & next steps (0:36-0:40): vote live on the top use cases, challenges, and feature requests. Come prepared to talk about What tools and skills your agents use today, and how they're wired up. Which capabilities you'd turn into reusable, composable Skills shared across agents. How many tools your agents carry, and whether you hit prompt-size or tool-selection accuracy issues. Which tools you'd expose through a shared endpoint, and which need tighter scoping. How you want to control what an agent is allowed to discover and invoke with Tool Search. The examples, samples, and tutorials that would help you get started fastest. Responsible and secure by design Because these features let agents discover and invoke tools dynamically, governance is a first-class part of the conversation. Foundry toolboxes are governed by default: you can screen every tool's inputs and outputs with an RAI guardrail, front your MCP servers with a bring-your-own AI gateway (APIM), scope which tools are discoverable, and use least-privilege identity passthrough so downstream calls carry the real user's permissions and audit trail. Bring your enterprise safeguard requirements because they directly shape the roadmap. Note: Toolbox, Tool Search, and Skills are in preview; APIs and headers may change. Key takeaways Toolbox packages tools once behind a single governed, versioned MCP endpoint, so you can build once and consume from any framework. Skills are reusable, composable capabilities you register once and chain across agents. Tool Search uses two meta-tools and progressive disclosure so agents scale to hundreds of tools without prompt bloat. Auth is simplified: the agent's managed identity gates the toolbox, while end-user token passthrough gives correct, least-privilege downstream access with no OAuth plumbing in your code. Your feedback shapes the product because this round table feeds directly into the engineering and product teams. Save your spot Add it to your calendar: 22 July 2026, 5:00 PM BST. Join the community: https://aka.ms/foundry/discord Prep with the sample: run the Mastering Foundry Toolbox notebook to build, search, and consume a toolbox end to end. Read the docs: Toolbox, Tool Search, and Skills. Agents get more capable as they gain access to more tools and skills, but only if you can build, govern, and scale those capabilities without drowning in integration and prompt bloat. Come and share how you are doing it today, and help shape how Foundry does it next. See you on 22 July.Building AI Agents from Zero to Production
Building AI Agents from Zero to Production Most agent demos stop at "it answered my question." Production doesn't. The gap between a notebook that calls an LLM and a governed, observable, multi-agent system your organisation can actually depend on is where real engineering happens, evaluation, deployment, data sovereignty, tool governance, and cross-team interoperability. Microsoft's open-source course Building AI Agents from Zero to Production walks that entire arc in seven lessons, using one realistic use case and the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) plus Microsoft Foundry. This post is a developer-focused tour of what it teaches, the architecture decisions behind each stage, and the code patterns that matter when you move from prototype to production. Who this is for AI engineers building their first or first production, agent system. Backend and full-stack developers integrating agents into real applications and CI/CD. Cloud architects who need data sovereignty, private networking, and governance around agent workloads. Technical leads deciding how to standardise tools and orchestration across multiple teams. The samples are Python 3.12+, served through Microsoft Foundry using GPT-5 series models (for example gpt-5.1 ). Lesson 4 adds a TypeScript/React frontend. You will want an Azure subscription and the Azure CLI. The AI Agent Development Lifecycle The course is organised around a lifecycle rather than a feature list. Each lesson is a stage, and each stage assumes the previous one is solved: # Stage The production question it answers 1 Agent Design What should each agent do, and how do they hand off? 2 Agent Development How do I build and run them with the Agent Framework? 3 Agent Evaluations How do I know they actually work — and keep working? 4 Agent Deployment How do I ship one as a hosted service with a UI and CI gate? 5 Production Hosted Agents How do I meet enterprise data, network, and governance needs? 6 Microsoft Toolbox How do I govern tools once, and reuse them across teams? 7 Multi-Agent & A2A How do agents from different teams interoperate safely? The thread running through all seven is a single scenario: a Developer Onboarding agent system that helps a new hire find the right teammates, get a sensible first task, and pull learning resources and code snippets. It is deliberately mundane, which is exactly why it exposes the production concerns that flashy demos hide. Lesson 1 — Agent Design: three components, one graph The course defines an agent by three parts: an LLM for reasoning, tools to act, and memory to retain context. The design work is context engineering — making sure the right information reaches the model at the right moment, no more and no less. Rather than one monolithic assistant, the onboarding system is split into specialists coordinated by a triage agent using handoff orchestration: Agent Job Tool Employee Search Answer org and people questions Foundry file search over an employee-directory vector store Task Recommendation Suggest 1–3 GitHub issues for the new dev GitHub MCP Server (reads recent commits + open issues) Code Assistant Provide resources and runnable snippets Microsoft Learn MCP + Code Interpreter Architecturally this is a directed graph: User → Triage → [Employee, Learning, Coding] . Splitting responsibilities early pays off later, each agent gets a tightly scoped prompt (less hallucination), can be evaluated independently, and can be upgraded without touching its peers. Lesson 2 — Development: standalone agents with MAF Here the design becomes code. Each specialist is a small, independently runnable service built with the Microsoft Agent Framework, authenticated to Foundry with your Azure CLI login. Setup is deliberately boring: az login az account set --subscription "<your-subscription-id>" cp .env.example .env # Fill FOUNDRY_PROJECT_ENDPOINT and FOUNDRY_MODEL (e.g. gpt-5.1) # Create the employee-directory vector store once; note the printed VECTOR_STORE_ID python lesson-2-agent-development/setup_vector_store.py # Start an agent — serves on http://localhost:8090 python lesson-2-agent-development/employee-search-agent.py The FoundryChatClient auto-reads any FOUNDRY_ -prefixed environment variables and uses AzureCliCredential , so there are no keys in code. The lesson ships six samples, each on its own port, so you can chat with them individually in the local DevUI before wiring them together: Sample Tool Port employee-search-agent.py Foundry file search / vector store 8090 task-recommendation-agent.py GitHub MCP Server 8095 azure-learning-agent.py Microsoft Learn MCP 8092 coding-agent.py Code Interpreter 8093 learning-recommendation-agent.py Learn MCP + reasoning 8091 agent-orchestration.py Multi-agent handoff 8094 Why this matters: keeping each agent as its own process with its own port is a testability decision, not an accident. You can smoke-test one specialist in isolation, then compose them in agent-orchestration.py . Lesson 3 — Evaluation: you can't unit-test a probability distribution This is the lesson that separates a demo from a product. Agents are non-deterministic, so traditional assertions don't fit. The course uses three complementary layers: Observability / tracing — always on, via OpenTelemetry to Application Insights. Smoke tests — fast, run on every deploy. Evaluations — deeper, model-based scoring run on-demand or nightly. Turning on tracing is a single call: from agent_framework.foundry import FoundryChatClient client = FoundryChatClient() client.configure_azure_monitor() # export traces + metrics to Application Insights For quality it uses Foundry's built-in "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluators against real persisted responses (identified by response_id ), not freshly regenerated ones: Evaluator evaluator_name Measures Relevance builtin.relevance Does the response address the request? Groundedness builtin.groundedness Is it supported by retrieved data (no hallucination)? Tool-call accuracy builtin.tool_call_accuracy Were the right tools called with the right arguments? Tool-output utilization builtin.tool_output_utilization Did the agent actually use tool results? The judge model is set independently via AZURE_AI_MODEL_DEPLOYMENT_NAME , so you can evaluate a cheap production model with a stronger one. The run prints a report_url that deep-links into the Foundry portal. Lesson 4 — Deployment: a hosted agent, a UI, and a CI gate Now the agent becomes a managed service. It is deployed as a Foundry Hosted Agent a Microsoft-managed execution environment and fronted by an OpenAI ChatKit React UI talking to a FastAPI backend: ChatKit React (3000) → FastAPI backend (8001) → Foundry Hosted Agent → tools Building the agent is declarative attach tools, name it, serve it: agent = client.as_agent( name="DevOnboardingAgent", instructions="...", tools=[file_search_tool, learn_mcp_tool], ) # served with: from_agent_framework(agent).run() The recommended deploy path is the Azure Developer CLI: cd hosted-agent azd auth login azd agent deploy The genuinely production-minded part is the smoke test as a post-deploy CI gate. Six cases cover reachability, each scenario, off-topic prompt adherence, and multi-turn threading (verifying state via previous_response_id ). The GitHub Action runs them against the freshly deployed agent: export FOUNDRY_TOKEN=$(az account get-access-token \ --resource https://ai.azure.com/ --query accessToken -o tsv) python runner.py \ --project-endpoint "https://<account>.services.ai.azure.com/api/projects/<project>" \ --agent-name dev-onboarding \ --tests-file tests/smoke-tests.json Pitfall to remember: the token audience must be https://ai.azure.com/ . A cognitiveservices.azure.com token is rejected by the Responses API — a mistake that costs many engineers an afternoon. Lesson 5 — Production: separating where an agent runs from where its data lives The pivotal concept for enterprise readiness is the distinction between a Hosted Agent (compute, scaling, identity) and a Capability Host (where conversation history, files, and embeddings actually reside): Concern Hosted Agent Capability Host Compute / scaling / identity ✅ Provided — Conversation history Microsoft-managed default Redirect to your Azure Cosmos DB File uploads Microsoft-managed default Redirect to your Azure Storage Vector embeddings Microsoft-managed default Redirect to your Azure AI Search Required to run the agent? ✅ Yes ❌ Optional Required for data sovereignty? ❌ Not sufficient ✅ Yes "Basic" setup uses Microsoft-managed storage and is perfect for getting started. "Standard" setup redirects each data plane to your own Azure resources through a project-level capability host, this is how you keep customer data in your tenant, inside your network boundary: PUT .../accounts/{account}/projects/{project}/capabilityHosts/{name}?api-version=2025-06-01 { "properties": { "capabilityHostKind": "Agents", "threadStorageConnections": ["my-cosmosdb-connection"], "vectorStoreConnections": ["my-ai-search-connection"], "storageConnections": ["my-storage-connection"] } } Operational constraints worth internalising before you provision: there is one capability host per scope (a second attempt returns 409 Conflict ), configuration is immutable (delete and recreate to change it), deletion is destructive, and the account-level host must exist before the project-level one. Lesson 6 — Toolbox: govern tools once, reuse everywhere Left unchecked, every team re-implements the same tools, scatters credentials, and loses governance visibility. The Microsoft Foundry Toolbox solves this by exposing a curated, versioned set of tools behind a single MCP-compatible endpoint, with credentials held in Foundry connections rather than agent code. You build a toolbox version once: from azure.ai.projects.models import MCPTool, ToolboxSearchPreviewTool, WebSearchTool toolbox_version = project.toolboxes.create_toolbox_version( name="agent-tools", description="Web search + an MCP server + tool search", tools=[ WebSearchTool(), MCPTool( server_label="myserver", server_url="https://your-mcp-server.example.com", require_approval="never", project_connection_id="my-key-auth-connection", # credentials live in Foundry ), ToolboxSearchPreviewTool(), ], ) And every agent consumes it through one endpoint, no per-team tool code: from agent_framework import MCPStreamableHTTPTool mcp_tool = MCPStreamableHTTPTool( name="toolbox", url=TOOLBOX_ENDPOINT, # {project_endpoint}/toolboxes/{name}/mcp?api-version=v1 http_client=http_client, load_prompts=False, ) agent = chat_client.as_agent(name="my-toolbox-agent", instructions="...", tools=[mcp_tool]) Versioning is blue/green: create a new version, test it on its version-specific endpoint, then promote it to default and every consumer picks it up with zero code changes. A Guardrail (RAI) policy can be applied at the toolbox layer, independent of model-level content filters. Note the toolbox management APIs are currently preview; the portal or VS Code Foundry Toolkit are practical alternatives for creation today. Lesson 7 — Multi-Agent & A2A: agents as networked peers The final lesson contrasts two ways agents collaborate: Handoff / Workflow — in-process, same codebase, fastest, tightest coupling. Agent-to-Agent (A2A) — cross-process over an open protocol, so agents from different teams, orgs, or frameworks interoperate. A2A gives each agent a discoverable Agent Card at /.well-known/agent-card.json and a task lifecycle (submitted → working → completed/failed). The elegant part: A2AExecutor wraps an existing MAF agent with no changes to that agent's code. from agent_framework.a2a import A2AExecutor from a2a.server.apps import A2AStarletteApplication from a2a.server.tasks import InMemoryTaskStore agent_card = AgentCard( name="Coding Assistant", url="http://localhost:9000/", version="1.0.0", capabilities=AgentCapabilities(streaming=True), skills=[AgentSkill(id="generate-code", name="Generate code", tags=["code"])], ) request_handler = DefaultRequestHandler( agent_executor=A2AExecutor(agent), # wraps your existing MAF agent unchanged task_store=InMemoryTaskStore(), ) app = A2AStarletteApplication(agent_card=agent_card, http_handler=request_handler).build() Consuming a remote agent then looks exactly like calling a local one: from agent_framework.a2a import A2AAgent remote_agent = A2AAgent(name="remote-coding-assistant", url="http://localhost:9000") result = await remote_agent.run("Write a Python function that reverses a string.") Because an A2AAgent can be a participant inside a HandoffBuilder workflow, you can mix in-process routing with remote services in the same orchestration. For enterprise use, A2AAgent accepts an auth_interceptor for bearer tokens, and the Agent Card carries security_schemes . Responsible and secure by design Production readiness in this course is not just uptime, it is governance: Identity over keys — AzureCliCredential and managed identity throughout; no secrets in code. Least privilege — CI runners get a scoped Azure AI User role assignment on the specific project. Data sovereignty — capability hosts keep conversation history, files, and embeddings in your own Cosmos DB, Storage, and AI Search. Tool approval and guardrails — MCP approval_mode and toolbox-level RAI policy gate what agents can do. Grounded evaluation — groundedness and tool-utilization scoring catch hallucination and unused-tool behaviour before users do. Cost hygiene — the lessons create real Azure resources; delete the resource group when done: az group delete --name <rg> --yes --no-wait . Key takeaways Design as a graph of specialists. Handoff orchestration with tightly scoped agents beats one monolith on reliability and testability. One .run() contract, many backends. The Agent Framework keeps orchestration code stable from local dev to hosted production. Evaluate continuously. Tracing + smoke tests + model-based evaluators are three layers, not alternatives. Separate compute from data. Hosted Agents run the agent; Capability Hosts give you sovereignty — you need both for enterprise. Govern tools centrally. A versioned toolbox behind one MCP endpoint kills tool sprawl and credential duplication. Open protocols for interop. A2A lets agents cross team, org, and framework boundaries without rewrites. Get started Clone the repo (skip the 50+ translations for a faster download) and work through the lessons in order: git clone --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/microsoft/Building-AI-Agents-From-Zero-To-Production.git cd Building-AI-Agents-From-Zero-To-Production git sparse-checkout set --no-cone '/*' '!translations' '!translated_images' References Building AI Agents from Zero to Production — course repo Microsoft Agent Framework Microsoft Foundry documentation Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol specification a2a-python SDK AI Agents for Beginners MCP for Beginners Microsoft Foundry DiscordCreating Autonomous Teams Agents Using OpenClaw, MCP, and Azure Container Apps
The one shift that changes everything For two years, "AI coding" meant autocomplete. A suggestion appears in your editor, you hit tab, you move on. The agent only existed while you were actively typing. That is no longer the only model. A new category of tools runs asynchronously and autonomously: you message the agent from a chat window — Teams, Slack, Telegram — describe what you want, and walk away. The agent plans, writes code, runs tests, deploys, and hands you back a result. Some of them never sleep: they hold a persistent memory, load their own skills, and act on a schedule without being prompted. This is the world of OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and the other long-running autonomous agents that exploded across developer culture in 2026. OpenClaw alone crossed 377,000 GitHub stars and millions of active users, becoming — for a while — the most-starred project on GitHub. You install it with one line, connect a channel, and start delegating from your phone. The workflow moves from pair programming to delegation and review. The interactive copilot asks, "What should I write next?" The autonomous agent asks, "What do you need done?" And that reframing is exactly why three questions now keep architects awake: Is it safe? You are handing a self-driving process the ability to run shell commands, touch files, and call APIs. One community report memorably described these agents as a teammate in your group chat who happens to have root access to your codebase. That is not a compliment — it is a threat model. Can it fit into real multi-agent work? A single agent is a demo. Production is a fleet — specialists that hand off to each other with gates in between. Is it flexible and controllable? Autonomy is thrilling right up until the agent packages last week's stale files into this week's deliverable, or loops forever on a failing test. This post answers all three — not with hand-waving, but with a working reference implementation you can clone today: CustomCodingAgentApp in the Multi-AI-Agents-Cloud-Native repo, an "Agentic Prototype Factory" that turns a plain-language idea into a tested, live-on-Azure prototype without leaving the chat window. A product manager types "Build a BBC-style World Cup feature page" in Microsoft Teams. Minutes later they get back a running HTTPS URL and a downloadable source ZIP. Under the hood, five specialized OpenClaw agents powered by Microsoft Foundry gpt-5.5 collaborate in a shared sandbox, run real pytest/Jest suites, and ship the result to Azure Container Apps — all orchestrated behind a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service so any MCP client (GitHub Copilot, Claude, the Teams bot) can drive it. We'll build up to that architecture in the order you should learn it. Part 1 — Long-running autonomous agents, and their two hard problems What actually makes them different A traditional chatbot is text in, text out. It waits for you. An autonomous agent inverts that: Property Traditional chatbot Long-running autonomous agent Execution Responds to a prompt Acts proactively (a "heartbeat" wakes it on a schedule) Scope Words Files, shell, browser, APIs — the real machine Memory This session only Persistent across sessions Interface A web box Any chat channel + the terminal Autonomy None Plans and takes multi-step action on its own Architecturally, OpenClaw is not a library you import — it's a runtime. A single long-running process (the Gateway) bridges your messaging channels to an LLM backend, keeps sessions alive, queues work in ordered lanes, and drives the classic agent loop: call the model → execute the tool calls it asks for → feed results back → repeat until done. There is no rigid step-planner; the model itself steers. That is what makes it feel magical — and what makes it hard to contain. That containment problem has two faces. Hard problem #1 — Security The same properties that make an autonomous agent useful make it dangerous. Full system access + proactive execution + a 32,000-server tool ecosystem is a large, self-driving attack surface. OpenClaw's own short history is the cautionary tale: a critical one-click remote-code-execution CVE early in its life, hundreds of malicious community "skills" discovered on its marketplace, and tens of thousands of gateways found exposed on the open internet. None of this means "don't use autonomous agents." It means: never run one with ambient credentials on a machine you care about. The agent belongs in a box with a hard wall around it. Hard problem #2 — Persistence and continuity Real agent work is long. Refactoring a codebase, researching across dozens of pages, building-testing-deploying an app — these take minutes to hours, far past a single request/response. So the runtime needs durable sessions, a place to keep state, and a workspace that survives across steps. But a persistent workspace that is reused creates its own hazard: state leakage. Files from yesterday's task can contaminate — or get shipped inside — today's result. Continuity and cleanliness pull in opposite directions, and you have to engineer the tension out. One agent is a demo; production is a fleet A single monolithic agent asked to "gather requirements, write the code, test it, deploy it, and package it" will do all four mediocrely and blur the boundaries between them. The production pattern is orchestrator-worker: specialized agents, each with one job, handing off to the next through explicit gates. OpenClaw supports exactly this — it can spawn sub-agents and even dispatch external coding harnesses, acting as a meta-orchestrator rather than a single model. The open question is never whether to go multi-agent; it's where the seams and the guardrails go. The answer to "is it safe?": put the agent in a microVM If the agent needs root to be useful, then give it root — inside a disposable microVM, not on your host. In 2026 there are several credible ways to do this: Kata Containers on AKS — each pod gets its own lightweight VM boundary and guest kernel. Hyperlight Wasm — per-call, snapshot-restored Wasm microVMs for running LLM-generated code. Azure Container Apps dynamic sessions — prewarmed, Hyper-V-isolated sandboxes that start in milliseconds, scale to thousands, and are purpose-built for "secure execution of custom code" and "running LLM-generated scripts." That last one — the ACA sandbox — is the sweet spot for a chat-driven agent factory: strong isolation without you operating a Kubernetes cluster, and an exec API to run commands inside the box. It's what the reference implementation uses. Part 2 — Putting OpenClaw into the ACA sandbox Here is where the repo stops being a diagram and becomes running code. The Agentic Prototype Factory decomposes the "idea → live app" job into five specialized OpenClaw agents that run in sequence, all inside the sandbox: requirements → coding → testing → deployment → save Each is addressable as its own model target on the OpenClaw gateway's OpenAI-compatible API: model value Routes to openclaw / openclaw/default Default agent openclaw/requirements-agent Requirement Agent openclaw/coding-agent Coding Agent openclaw/testing-agent Testing Agent openclaw/deployment-agent Deployment Agent openclaw/save-agent Save & download Agent Control, not vibes: review gates with feedback loops Autonomy without gates is how you get an agent that confidently deploys a broken app. The orchestrator wires the five agents into a graph with hard, bounded gates: Every knob is explicit and lives in server.py: _MAX_TEST_ROUNDS = 3, _MAX_DEPLOY_REVIEW = 2, _DEPLOY_POLL_ATTEMPTS = 12, _DEPLOY_POLL_DELAY_S = 20. The Testing Agent must end each turn with a literal TESTS_PASSED / TESTS_FAILED verdict; the orchestrator won't declare success until it HTTP-checks the deployed URL and inspects the response body — because a ResourceNotFound can happily return an HTTP 200. That is what "flexible and controllable" looks like in practice: the LLM drives creatively inside a deterministic state machine. The deterministic pre-run wipe (solving state leakage) Because the sandbox is reused across runs (fast, cheap), the orchestrator does something disciplined before every run: it wipes all lingering agent workspaces. Stale files from a previous task can never leak into — or be packaged as — the new result. This is the engineered answer to Hard Problem #2. Working with the sandbox's limits, not against them The ACA sandbox exec API is hard-capped at ~120 seconds — shorter than a cold az acr build plus az containerapp create. A naive agent would time out and report failure. The clever bit: those commands finish server-side on Azure even after the client exec disconnects. So deployment is split in two: deploy-build <dir> <app> — installs the deploy helpers, writes a tight .dockerignore, and kicks off the ACR build tagged <app>:latest. If the client drops at ~120s, the image still lands in ACR. deploy-finish <app> — idempotent, polled up to 12×. It reports STILL_BUILDING until the image exists, then fires a --no-wait containerapp create, and finally returns DEPLOYED_URL=https://<fqdn>. This is the single most important lesson of the whole sample: an autonomous agent doesn't need a longer timeout — it needs to understand the durability semantics of the platform it runs on. Part 3 — MCP, and why its security is the whole ballgame The five-agent workflow is powerful, but it would be a silo if the only way to reach it were a bespoke API. Instead, the repo wraps the entire orchestration as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service (acamcp_node) exposed over streamable HTTP at /mcp, with a tiny, legible tool surface: MCP tool What it does generate_prototype Run the full five-agent workflow end to end run_agent Invoke a single named agent check_gateway_health Liveness / readiness of the OpenClaw gateway The payoff is enormous: any MCP client can now drive the factory — GitHub Copilot, Claude, or the Teams bot we're about to meet. One protocol, many front-ends. But MCP is not just an integration convenience — it's a control plane, and every MCP tool is a privileged capability. In an ecosystem with 32,000+ community servers, "just add an MCP server" is a supply-chain decision. A tool call is code execution by another name. So the security posture has to be deliberate. Here is how the reference implementation hardens it — and the principles are portable to any MCP deployment: Auth in front of the protocol. The MCP ingress sits behind basic auth (MCP_BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD); the gateway itself requires the gateway token as a bearer credential (Authorization: Bearer <token>). No anonymous tool calls. A tiny, named allowlist — not a blank check. The gateway routes only to six explicit model targets. There is no "run arbitrary agent" escape hatch; the routing table is the allowlist. No secrets in the workload. There are no model API keys anywhere in the running containers — model access is brokered entirely through Entra ID managed identities. The gateway token is stored as a Kubernetes secret and never baked into an image. Private by default. The gateway's OpenAI-compatible endpoint is operator-level access — it stays on private ingress, with TLS and authentication added before anything is ever exposed publicly. Least privilege at the identity layer. The gateway is granted exactly the Foundry roles it needs (Cognitive Services User / Cognitive Services OpenAI User) on the Foundry resource — nothing more. The takeaway for MCP is the same as for the agent itself: treat the protocol as a doorway, and put a guard on the door. Authentication, an explicit allowlist, private ingress, and brokered identity turn MCP from an open blast radius into a governed control plane. Part 4 — The complete solution: Teams + MCP on ACA + OpenClaw on the ACA sandbox Now assemble the three deployable components into one loop: The request lifecycle, end to end A PM sends one sentence in Teams. The teamsbot_app bot — acting as an MCP client via mcpClient.ts — opens an MCP handshake and calls generate_prototype. The MCP service on ACA (acamcp_node) runs the orchestrator: pre-run wipe, then requirements → coding → testing. The OpenClaw gateway in the ACA sandbox (acasbxapp_node) executes each agent, talking to Foundry gpt-5.5 through a managed identity — no keys in the box. Real pytest + Jest suites run inside the sandbox. Fail → loop back (bounded). Pass → deploy. Deployment uses the build + poll split to survive the ~120s exec cap; the app lands in Azure Container Apps and is health-checked body-aware at its live URL. The Save Agent produces an authenticated ZIP download URL. The bot streams each agent's progress back into the Teams thread and returns the running HTTPS URL + source ZIP — optionally auto-opening the project in VS Code Insiders. How the architecture answers the three questions The question How this solution answers it Is it safe? The autonomous agent runs in a Hyper-V-isolated ACA sandbox, not on anyone's laptop. No model keys in the workload — Entra ID managed identity brokers Foundry. MCP behind basic auth; gateway behind a bearer token on private ingress; token as a secret, never in an image. A deterministic pre-run wipe removes cross-run leakage. Does it fit multi-agent work? It is a multi-agent system — five specialist OpenClaw agents with A2A hand-offs and review gates — and because it's exposed via MCP, any client (Copilot, Claude, Teams) can orchestrate it. Is it flexible and controllable? Creativity lives inside a deterministic state machine: explicit TESTS_PASSED/FAILED verdicts, bounded retry loops (_MAX_TEST_ROUNDS, _MAX_DEPLOY_REVIEW), body-aware health checks, and a human approving in the Teams thread. Deploy it yourself The repo ships scripts for all three tiers (the gateway uses the platform's managed identity to reach Foundry — no key handling, no image rebuild): # 1) OpenClaw gateway + the 5 agents (acasbxapp_node) cd acasbxapp_node cp .env.example .env # gateway token, Foundry endpoint, sandbox ids ./scripts/build-openclaw-image.sh # build + push the OpenClaw image to ACR ./scripts/deploy-aks-gateway.sh # grant Foundry roles + deploy # 2) MCP service (acamcp_node) cd ../acamcp_node cp .env.example .env # ACR + cluster; gateway token read from ../acasbxapp_node/.env ./scripts/build-images.sh # build + push the MCP image ./scripts/deploy-aks.sh # secret + manifests to the openclaw namespace ./scripts/smoke-check.sh # verify the MCP handshake # 3) Teams bot (teamsbot_app) — Node.js/TypeScript MCP client cd ../teamsbot_app # configure + run per the folder README, then sideload the Teams app package The reference implementation targets Azure (ACA + AKS) — the OpenClaw gateway and MCP service run as containers, and the code-execution sandbox uses the ACA dynamic-sessions exec API. Keep the gateway on private ingress and add TLS before any public exposure. Final thought Strip away the World Cup demo and a reusable pattern remains — a blueprint for running any long-running autonomous agent in the enterprise: A message-driven agent (OpenClaw / Hermes) + a microVM sandbox (Azure Container Apps dynamic sessions) + an MCP control plane with auth + enterprise identity (Entra ID managed identity) + a human surface (Microsoft Teams). The autonomy that made these agents go viral is the same autonomy that makes security teams nervous. You don't resolve that tension by slowing the agent down — you resolve it by giving it a box with a hard wall, a control plane with a guard on the door, an identity instead of a secret, and a human in the loop. Do that, and "your PM types a sentence, Azure ships an app" stops being a scary demo and becomes something you can actually put in production. Clone it, break it, harden it further: kinfey/Multi-AI-Agents-Cloud-Native → code/CustomCodingAgentApp The chat window is the new terminal. Let's make it a safe one.
