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What is Microsoft Foundry?

Microsoft Foundry unifies agents, models, and tools under a single management grouping with built-in enterprise-readiness capabilities including tracing, monitoring, evaluations, and customizable enterprise setup configurations. The platform provides streamlined management through unified role-based access control (RBAC), networking, and policies under one Azure resource provider namespace.

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What you can build

Capability Description
Agents Build declarative prompt agents in the portal or SDK, or deploy hosted agents that run your own code. Learn more in Foundry Agent Service.
Models Access more than 1,900 models from Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others. Browse the Foundry Models catalog.
Tools and knowledge Extend agents with built-in tools, memory, and retrieval from the tool catalog.

Enterprise-ready platform

Foundry brings production capabilities to every project:

  • Observability: Trace, monitor, and evaluate agents and models with built-in dashboards. See Observability.
  • Governance and security: Apply Microsoft Entra identity, role-based access control, content filters, network isolation, and Azure Policy. See the Foundry control plane.
  • One management plane: Manage agents, models, and tools as a single Azure resource with unified access control, networking, and policies.

Evolution of Foundry

Foundry consolidates several previous Azure AI services and tools into a unified platform. The following table maps previous concepts to their current equivalents. For detailed guidance on transitioning, see Navigate from classic to the new experience.

Dimension Previous Current
Brand Azure AI Studio / Azure AI Foundry Microsoft Foundry
Brand Azure AI Services Foundry Tools
Portal Foundry (classic) Foundry
Agent API Assistants API (Agents v0.5/v1) Responses API (Agents v2)
API versioning Monthly api-version params v1 stable routes (/openai/v1/)
Resource model Hub + Azure OpenAI + Azure AI Services Foundry resource (single, with projects)
SDKs & endpoints Multiple packages (azure-ai-inference, azure-ai-generative, azure-ai-ml, AzureOpenAI()) against 5+ endpoints Unified project client (azure-ai-projects 2.x) + OpenAI() against one project endpoint.
Terminology Threads, Messages, Runs, Assistants Conversations, Items, Responses, Agent Versions