Why it matters: Microsoft Foundry provides a comprehensive, secure, and modular platform for developers to build, deploy, and manage AI agents and applications at scale, integrating advanced models and developer tools. This accelerates the shift from prescriptive logic to intelligent, adaptive systems.
- •Microsoft Foundry offers a modular, interoperable, and secure agent stack for building AI applications.
- •New Foundry Models include offerings from Anthropic, Cohere, and NVIDIA, with a generally available model router.
- •Foundry IQ, now in public preview, redefines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for improved orchestration and response quality.
- •Foundry Agent Service introduces Hosted Agents, multi-agent workflows, built-in memory, and direct deployment to Microsoft 365.
- •Foundry Control Plane centralizes identity, policy, observability, and security, integrating with GitHub Advanced Security.
- •Foundry Local is in private preview on Android, extending agent capabilities to mobile platforms.
- •AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot and AgentHQ enhance developer productivity for building intelligent systems.
Why it matters: Engineers gain access to Anthropic's Claude models on Azure Foundry, alongside GPT, offering unparalleled choice for building advanced AI agents. This integration simplifies operationalization, providing robust governance and security for scalable, enterprise-grade AI solutions.
- •Microsoft Foundry now integrates Anthropic's Claude models (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus), positioning Azure as the only cloud with both Claude and GPT frontier models.
- •Claude models are engineered for enterprise use, supporting diverse applications from real-time chatbots to complex research and agentic software development, with Constitutional AI for safety.
- •The platform addresses the challenge of operationalizing AI agents, providing governance, observability, and seamless integration into enterprise workflows.
- •Foundry Agent Service uses Claude for intelligent agents, enabling multi-step workflows, integration with productivity tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP), and automated data tasks.
- •Key features include real-time model selection for efficiency and cost savings, alongside unified controls for managing agent fleets.
- •Developers can also leverage Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent, within Foundry.
Why it matters: This project demonstrates cutting-edge subsea cable engineering, utilizing SDM and optical switching to build massive-scale, open-access infrastructure. It's crucial for global connectivity, supporting future AI, cloud, and high-bandwidth applications across three continents.
- •The core 2Africa system, the world's longest open-access subsea cable, is complete, connecting 33 countries across Africa, Europe, and Asia.
- •It's the first cable to continuously link East and West Africa, and connect Africa to the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe.
- •The project, led by a Meta-consortium, uses an open-access model to promote competition and accelerate digital transformation.
- •Engineering innovations include Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM) for 16 fiber pairs (double older systems) and undersea optical wavelength switching.
- •This infrastructure supports evolving demands for AI, cloud, and high-bandwidth applications, enabling connectivity for 3 billion people.
Why it matters: This incident highlights the critical importance of robust change management, configuration validation, and effective incident response in large-scale distributed systems. It underscores how seemingly minor changes can cascade into widespread failures.
- •Cloudflare experienced a significant outage due to a database permission change that generated an oversized "feature file" for its Bot Management system.
- •The excessively large feature file, propagated across the network, caused routing software to fail as it exceeded an internal size limit.
- •Initial incident response was complicated by fluctuating system failures, leading to a temporary misdiagnosis of a DDoS attack.
- •Resolution involved halting the propagation of the bad configuration, manually inserting a known good file, and restarting the core proxy.
- •The outage impacted core CDN, security services, Workers KV, Turnstile, and Access, manifesting as widespread HTTP 5xx errors and increased latency.
Why it matters: As AI moves from search to agents, managing the context window is critical. This article explains how to prevent performance degradation and context rot by curating tools and data, ensuring models remain fast and accurate even as capabilities expand.
- •Dropbox Dash transitioned from a standard RAG search system to an agentic AI capable of planning and executing complex tasks.
- •Context engineering was implemented to solve 'analysis paralysis' caused by providing the model with too many tool options and definitions.
- •The team utilizes the Model Context Protocol (MCP) but optimizes it to reduce token consumption and prevent performance degradation.
- •To combat 'context rot,' Dash limits tool definitions in the context window and filters for only the most relevant data.
- •Specialized agents are deployed for tasks requiring deeper reasoning to maintain precision without overwhelming the primary model.
Why it matters: This release significantly improves Git's performance for large repositories by introducing `git last-modified` for faster tree-level blame and enhancing `git maintenance` with more efficient repacking strategies. These updates streamline developer workflows and reduce operational overhead.
- •Git 2.52 introduces `git last-modified`, a new command for efficiently determining the most recent commit for every file within a given directory (tree-level blame).
- •This command offers a significant performance improvement, being over 5 times faster than traditional methods like iterating `git log -1` for each file.
- •The core functionality of `git last-modified` was developed by GitHub as `blame-tree` and has now been open-sourced and integrated into Git.
- •The release also brings advancements to `git maintenance`, a command for scheduled or ad-hoc repository housekeeping tasks.
- •Git maintenance now supports alternative strategies like `incremental-repack` to improve efficiency for very large repositories, moving beyond the default "all-into-one" repacks.
Why it matters: This article details the intricate process of preserving HDR video metadata (Dolby Vision, AMVE) across a large-scale video pipeline. It's crucial for engineers working on media processing, mobile development, and ensuring high-quality user experiences on global platforms.
- •Instagram for iOS now supports Dolby Vision and Ambient Viewing Environment (AMVE) metadata for enhanced HDR video playback.
- •This involved preserving unique Dolby Vision and AMVE metadata from iPhone-produced HDR videos throughout Meta's video processing pipeline.
- •Previously, FFmpeg-based transcoding systems discarded this metadata, impacting picture consistency, especially at low screen brightness.
- •Meta collaborated with the community to add AMVE support to FFmpeg and adopted Dolby Vision Profile 10 for AV1 delivery.
- •This enhancement makes Instagram the first Meta app to support Dolby Vision video, with future expansion across other Meta platforms.
- •The solution addresses challenges like carrying Dolby Vision metadata in non-HEVC codecs and managing different Dolby Vision profiles.
Why it matters: This acquisition significantly enhances Cloudflare's AI capabilities, offering developers a vast model catalog and simplified deployment on a global, high-performance edge network. It streamlines AI application development, making advanced models more accessible and efficient for engineers.
- •Replicate, a leading AI model platform, is joining Cloudflare to integrate its services into Cloudflare's Developer Platform.
- •This acquisition significantly expands Cloudflare's Workers AI model catalog, enabling users to run fine-tuned and custom models directly on the platform.
- •Replicate's platform simplifies AI model deployment by abstracting complex infrastructure, utilizing its open-source tool Cog for containerization.
- •Cloudflare's 'AI Cloud' provides serverless GPU inference at the edge (Workers AI), a control plane (AI Gateway), data storage (Vectorize, R2), and orchestration tools.
- •The combined entity will offer a comprehensive selection of over 50,000 models from Replicate's catalog, runnable on Cloudflare's global, high-performance network.
Why it matters: Engineers can learn how open hardware, AI, and collaborative projects like OCP are crucial for achieving environmental sustainability goals in tech. It highlights practical applications of AI in reducing carbon footprints for IT infrastructure and data centers.
- •Meta's podcast discusses open hardware and the Open Compute Project (OCP) for environmental sustainability.
- •OCP, a collaborative initiative with over 400 companies, focuses on open hardware designs to reduce environmental impact.
- •Meta leverages AI and open hardware to advance its goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2030.
- •A new open methodology employs AI to enhance the accuracy of Scope 3 emission estimates for IT hardware.
- •AI is also being used to innovate concrete mixes, leading to lower-carbon data center construction.
Why it matters: This article provides essential guidance for engineers to master Copilot Code Review instruction files, enabling more effective and consistent automated code reviews tailored to project standards. It helps optimize AI-assisted development workflows.
- •Copilot Code Review (CCR) leverages copilot-instructions.md and path-specific *.instructions.md files for customizable automated code reviews.
- •Instructions should be concise, structured, direct, and include code examples to effectively guide Copilot's review process.
- •Use repo-wide copilot-instructions.md for general standards and path-specific *.instructions.md with applyTo for language or topic-specific rules.
- •Avoid instructions that attempt to alter Copilot's UX, modify PR overviews, request non-review tasks, include external links, or make vague improvement demands.
- •A structured approach, including clear titles, purpose, naming, style, and code examples, is recommended for effective instruction files.