The most important Azure developments at a glance of Microsoft Ignite 2025

During Microsoft Ignite 2025, it became clear that Azure is continuing to evolve into an intelligent, secure, and future-oriented platform. Microsoft highlighted existing and new technologies that help organizations innovate faster, improve security, and simplify management. Below are the key developments and what they mean for your organization.

New computing power and infrastructure

Microsoft is investing in optical computing, a technology that uses light for calculations instead of traditional electronics. This development promises significantly higher speed and energy efficiency in the long term—valuable for organizations that process large amounts of data or run AI models.

In addition, Azure Boost was brought back into the spotlight. This technology, which is already available, accelerates network, storage, and security tasks by handling them at the hardware level. This results in higher performance, better isolation of workloads, and less overhead.

Microsoft is also introducing Azure Cobalt 200, the latest generation of cloud-native CPUs (currently in preview). This chip is designed for higher efficiency and better performance in AI and cloud workloads.

Smarter automation with MCP servers and agents

Microsoft is expanding the use of the Model Context Protocol within Azure. MCP servers for Azure services such as Migrate, Assessments, Advisor, and Monitor are now available in preview. This allows Copilot agents and Foundry agents to communicate directly with these services.

This makes it possible to largely automate analyses, configuration checks, optimizations, and migration preparations. The integration between MCP servers and Copilot agents within Azure is still in preview, but it shows that agents will play a central role in future cloud management.

Network functionality for better security

Microsoft is strongly committed to secure and reliable network architectures. Important components include:

• Private Link Service – Direct Connect: private connections to your own services, without exposure to the public internet.
• Routing Intent and Forced Tunneling in Azure Virtual WAN: existing but now more widely supported functionality that ensures outgoing traffic is always routed through secure inspection.

These capabilities give organizations more control over data flows and strengthen the security of hybrid and multicloud environments.

Collaboration between Foundry and Copilot

Microsoft Foundry, the platform for developing proprietary AI agents, now integrates directly with Copilot. This allows agents to leverage each other's knowledge, tools, and workflows. This enables organizations to base process automation on their own business logic while benefiting from Copilot's generic intelligence.

Central Operations Center

Microsoft is working on a Central Operations Center, a central environment where organizations can monitor their entire Azure landscape and roll out configurations consistently. This provides insight into health, security, governance, and platform configurations within a single overview.

HorizonDB: a new generation of PostgreSQL

Microsoft is introducing HorizonDB, a high-performance PostgreSQL variant designed for data-intensive and AI-driven workloads. HorizonDB delivers higher performance, better scalability, and faster data access for modern applications.

Recommendation: Store documentation in Markdown

More and more organizations are working with AI agents that automate processes and support decisions. To ensure these agents function optimally, we recommend storing important documentation—such as work processes, guidelines, architectures, and configurations—in Markdown as much as possible.

Markdown is simple, standardized, and highly readable for agents. This makes it possible to:

• automatically analyze documentation;
• make business knowledge immediately available to agents;
• automate decisions and recommendations based on up-to-date information;
• efficiently integrate documentation into DevOps and cloud workflows.

This increases the quality of automation, improves the findability of information, and accelerates the adoption of AI-driven workflows.

In summary

Ignite 2025 shows that Azure is evolving into a powerful and intelligent platform that helps organizations innovate faster, work more securely, and manage more efficiently. With optical computing, Azure Boost, Cobalt 200 chips, MCP integrations, network reinforcement, Foundry agents, HorizonDB, and the Central Operations Center, Microsoft is taking major steps toward a future in which automation and intelligence are central.