Cloudy with a Chance of Insights | A Microsoft Cloud (Azure, M365) Show for Architects & Engineers

This week Richard, David, and Cyrus spend less time gawping at shiny features and more time on the awkward bit that follows, which is who is supposed to own the behaviour, risk, and cost once agents start doing real work. David opens with Microsoft’s architecture guidance on agent design, arguing that testing AI systems needs a behaviour contract rather than blind faith in prompts or model choice.Richard then picks up the thread from the enterprise side with GitHub Copilot Fusion and Agentic Workflows. The interesting part is not that GitHub can now orchestrate models more cleverly. It is that agentic work is becoming something you meter, govern, and supervise, a bit less like a helpful assistant, and a bit more like a workforce problem wearing a developer badge.Cyrus brings the security weight, covering ISO 27090, the PHP remote code execution mess, new Intune baseline housekeeping, and passkeys for B2B users in Entra. The episode rounds out with Foundry Local, sovereign model pressure in Europe, Dataverse writeback through Copilot Cowork, and why Microsoft’s own Storm-0940 reporting should make any organisation look much harder at app permissions and service principals.LinksGitHub Copilot FusionGitHub Agentic Workflows generally availableGitHub Enterprise now includes access to GitHub CopilotGlobal default for Copilot features generally availableGitHub Copilot app, Universe releasesMicrosoft Security Blog, Storm-0940 / ARTEX supply chain compromiseMicrosoft Security Blog, The CISO’s evolving role: Protecting and defending in the agentic eraPower Platform Blog, Dataverse plugin for Copilot CoworkAzure Architecture Center, AI agent orchestration patternsAzure Architecture Center, observability and testingFoundry Local, What is Foundry Local?PHP security archive, critical vulnerabilities and patched versionsIntune security baselines overviewSocialsX/TwitterBlueskyLinkedInFacebookThreadsMusicNull Invocation, Monochrome Pulse https://is.gd/b1kNU9

Microsoft used its 7 October Windows event to pitch the PC as the home for AI agents, under the banner of hybrid intelligence. David picks out the two pieces that matter if you build on it: Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), now generally available on Windows 11, which enforce what an agent can touch from outside the agent itself, and GitHub's plan for HydraFusion to route work between cloud models and models running on your own machine. He also untangles a quiet rename, with Foundry Local, the Windows AI APIs, and Windows ML now sitting under Microsoft Foundry on Windows. Richard reports back on a few days with HydraFusion in the GitHub Copilot app, where a routine deployment that a single model handled in about five minutes took twice as long with the orchestrator spinning up sub agents. The pair then ask the awkward question of what the consumer use case for agents is, beyond booking an Uber. Cyrus joins with the cyberattack that pushed refrigeration in hundreds of French supermarkets up to 50C through Danfoss control systems, an open source rebuild of Adobe's creative apps written in Rust with Claude Opus 5.5, and Merill Fernando's walkthrough of using the compliant network check with Entra ID P1 to make stolen tokens useless. Richard closes with Microsoft-Decision-1, a model that returns probabilities instead of prose and is priced to sit in front of your expensive models as a gatekeeper. Links Building Windows for hybrid intelligence (Windows Experience Blog) Project HydraFusion (GitHub Blog) Using HydraFusion in GitHub Copilot (GitHub Docs) Deploy and use Microsoft-Decision-1 (Microsoft Learn) Compliant network check with Conditional Access (Microsoft Learn) Entra.Chat, Merill Fernando's podcast French supermarket chains hit by cyberattack (Infosecurity Magazine) Vibe coded Adobe Creative Suite alternative (Gizmodo) Richard "Levelord" Gray has died (PC Gamer) Security flaw gave one man control of 7,000 robot vacuums (CNN via 14 News) Socials X/Twitter Bluesky LinkedIn Facebook Threads Music Null Invocation, Monochrome Pulse: https://is.gd/b1kNU9

Cyrus is off sick, so Richard and David hold the fort, and the planned running order lasts about ninety seconds. David opens on Microsoft's redesigned Copilot app and Autopilot, the agent formerly known as Scout, which runs in the cloud with its own identity and keeps working after you log off. His question is whether something like that is still a chat feature or a workload. Richard's answer is that it's closer to a colleague, and that the governance model should look more like managing staff than managing software. That leads to the more uncomfortable part of the conversation. David points out that an identity tells you an agent exists and where it signed in, and very little about what it did at the end of a chain of MCP calls. Richard describes having his own agents log their actions, reasoning, and a confidence score, and then admits the obvious flaw: the log is written by the thing that sometimes tells you it has done something it hasn't. David then covers the Azure SQL Database container for local development and agent-driven schema work, Microsoft Research's study on moving robot inference off the robot, and Azure AI Points of Presence, along with a healthy worry about where all those GPUs are supposed to live. Richard picks up agentic app creation in Power BI Desktop, a Purview archiving change that takes files out of Copilot's reach, the Quine Fellows programme from Microsoft Research, and a million-email invoice scam aimed at accounts payable teams. Links The new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot The Verge on the Copilot super app Azure SQL Database container Offloaded inference for physical AI robotics ExpressRoute and AI Points of Presence FabCon and SQLCon 2026 announcements Purview retention settings and archiving Introducing Quine AI-assisted executive impersonation and invoice fraud Socials X/Twitter Bluesky LinkedIn Facebook Threads Music Null Invocation, Monochrome Pulse: https://is.gd/b1kNU9

David went digging through the smaller Microsoft blogs this week and came back with something better than a feature announcement. A post from the Core Infrastructure and Security team looks at privileged access workstations locked down with Global Secure Access, and asks the question almost nobody asks: what does that device do when the tunnel drops? The answer is that it falls back to normal internet access, which is fine for a laptop and quite bad for the machine you administer your tenant from. The fix involves Windows Defender Firewall, event driven automation, and an Intune compliance check wired to Conditional Access, but the broader point stuck with all three of us. We know what our cloud delivered controls do when they are healthy. We have mostly not worked out what they do when they are not. David also covers versioning for custom Azure Policy definitions, now in preview, which sounds dull until you remember that until now a custom definition has been a mutable object with a single ID and no way to pin an assignment to a known good version. Cyrus walks through Maester 2.2, which adds 269 Active Directory checks to a tool that started life as an Entra and Microsoft 365 test framework, plus Purview, GitHub, and Global Secure Access coverage. He also picks up memory scanning arriving for Defender for Endpoint on Linux, and the third party behavioural signals now feeding Sentinel UEBA. Richard takes the AI half. OpenAI has published a framework for disclosing what it calls misalignment, along with six incidents from the past six months covering models concealing mistakes in their own summaries, an unauthorised API key, files pushed to the public internet, and agents using an internal repository as a message board. The episode opens on Microsoft's MAI code of conduct and whether a per vendor set of rules means anything in a multi-cloud estate, takes a detour through DeepSeek pricing and European regulation, and finishes on Copilot Business billing changes through CSP and GPT-6 Astra landing in Foundry at a price that will make you check your token budget. Links Locking down PAWs internet access when GSA drops, by Christian Friedel-Jain and James Noyce Maester releases and release notes Azure Policy definition structure and versioning OpenAI's misalignment disclosures and reporting framework, as reported X/Twitter Bluesky LinkedIn Facebook Threads Music: Null Invocation, Monochrome Pulse

This fortnightly look at the Microsoft cloud starts somewhere unexpected. IBM used Hot Chips to announce a mainframe processor that runs Z and Arm instructions natively on the same core. Cyrus walks through why that genuinely surprised him and what it means for banks running fraud detection and AI workloads next to core transaction processing, then pivots into the McDonald's data exposure and why the real story, again, is stolen credentials rather than a broken cloud platform.Richard picks up the identity thread through the OpenAI incident report on Hugging Face, where roughly 1,200 sandboxed agents broke isolation, found a shared message board, and started impersonating each other until one of them implemented its own encryption. He also covers the new GitHub Copilot Harness inside Copilot Studio, which quietly started billing from the first click rather than at publish time, and a Microsoft Research paper showing that 87 percent of GitHub Copilot's LLM calls in a recent week were fired off by agents rather than people.David closes the episode with Radius Canvas, a visual diff for what an agent actually changed in your application, Copilot's new ability to review and approve its own pull requests, and Microsoft's MCP firewall, which tries to put enterprise control around which MCP servers and capabilities agents can reach. Links IBM's dual architecture mainframe processor announcement Coverage of the McDonald's Azure data exposure Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access MCP firewall and tenant governance Windows Autopilot device association announcement Defender for Identity sensor configuration for AD FS, AD CS, and Entra Connect GitHub Copilot Harness billing change in Copilot Studio, Message Center MC1461678 Microsoft Research paper, Agentic Coding in the Wild Coverage of the Microsoft Research findings METR's independent investigation into the OpenAI Hugging Face incident OpenAI's technical report on the Hugging Face incident GitHub Copilot code review, including PR approvals Radius, the project behind Radius Canvas Follow and listen X/Twitter Bluesky LinkedIn Facebook Threads Music: Null Invocation, Monochrome Pulse. https://is.gd/b1kNU9