Building Agentic Solutions with Microsoft Foundry

Chapter 1. Introduction

In this chapter, we will get introduced to the Microsoft Foundry service and learn how to create your first Project resource in Azure.

Microsoft Foundry is Azure’s unified platform-as-a-service for building, deploying, and operating enterprise-grade AI systems. At its core, Microsoft Foundry provides a single control plane for agents, models, and tools, designed with enterprise readiness in mind. Built-in capabilities such as tracing, monitoring, evaluation, and customizable organizational configurations support reliable AI operations at scale. By consolidating role-based access control (RBAC), networking, and policy management under a single Azure resource provider namespace, Foundry simplifies governance and operational consistency across the AI application lifecycle.

A Brief History

If you have used Azure services for machine learning and artificial intelligence over the past few years, you may have noticed that Microsoft has had a few services that fall under this umbrella. Azure Machine Learning has been around for a while as Microsoft’s primary service for training and deploying machine learning models. More recently, the Azure OpenAI Service was launched to provide access to OpenAI’s language models directly through Azure. Then, Azure AI Foundry provided a way to deploy models and fine-tune them. However, there was a bigger need to enable agentic capabilities (connecting models to data and tools) and to allow enterprises to more easily govern and ...