What is Microsoft Foundry?
Microsoft's Azure platform for AI apps and agents, formerly Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Studio: one resource to deploy models from many makers, build agents and govern both.
beginner · Also called Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Studio, Foundry
Building with AI inside a large company means more than calling a model. Someone has to decide which models are allowed, who may use them, what data agents can reach, and how to see what they did. Microsoft Foundry is Azure's answer: one resource where all of that is set once.
One resource, several jobs
A Foundry resource holds projects, and a project holds:
- Model deployments. More than 10,000 models are in the catalogue, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft and others. A deployment picks how the model is served: Global Standard (the default), Data Zone to keep processing in the US, EU or Asia Pacific, Provisioned for reserved capacity, or Batch at half price.
- Agents. Prompt agents are declared, not coded: instructions, a model and tools. Voice prompt agents answer spoken questions. Hosted agents are your own code, written with Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph or Semantic Kernel, packaged as a container and run by Foundry.
- Tools and knowledge. A toolbox adds built-in tools, retrieval and memory to agents.
- Observability. Traces and evaluations show what models and agents did.
Over all of it sits the governance: Entra ID sign-in, role-based access, content filters, private networking and Azure Policy, applied to every model and agent in the resource. That is the main reason to use it: a security team reviews one platform, not each project.
A rename with real changes
The names have moved fast:
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| Azure AI Studio, then Azure AI Foundry | Microsoft Foundry |
| Azure AI Services | Foundry Tools |
| Hub + Azure OpenAI + AI Services resources | One Foundry resource with projects |
| Assistants API | Responses API |
A dated api-version on every call | The v1 API at /openai/v1/ |
So "Azure OpenAI" is now one part of Foundry: OpenAI's models deployed and called through it. See Azure OpenAIAzure OpenAIOpenAI's models run by Microsoft inside Azure, now part of Microsoft Foundry. Same models and SDK as OpenAI's API, but your data stays with Microsoft, under your Azure agreement..
How you reach it
Through the Foundry portal, the azure-ai-projects SDK (which hands you a standard OpenAI client), the Azure Developer CLI for hosted agents, VS Code, and coding agents through an MCPModel Context ProtocolAn open standard for connecting AI applications to tools and data. A system offered once as an MCP server works in any application that speaks MCP. server. Calling a model is plain OpenAI SDK code pointed at your resource.
Our article What is Microsoft Foundry lists every old name beside its new one and what to migrate first.
Sources