Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
Predicting and detecting failures: How Azure strengthens reliability for mission-critical workloads
Takeaway : Azure Failure Prediction and Detection (AFPD) is Microsoft Azure’s end-to-end system aiming to catch hardware failures before they interrupt a workload, not after. Across the Azure fleet, AFPD has improved the prevention of hardware-related VM interruptions by 36% . SAP workloads offer a compelling example of AFPD’s value, illustrating why preventing interruptions ma
The Platform Behind the Next AI Breakthrough
This article has been written and paid for by Microsoft. The content is not WIRED editorial content. The content does not necessarily reflect the views of WIRED, its affiliates, or owner, and does not reflect any endorsement direct or indirect of Microsoft, its affiliates, or other clients. The next frontier of AI is coming into focus as agents take on longer, more strategic wo
AWS Weekly Roundup: GPT-6.1 Terra on Bedrock, Step Functions as agent tools, and more (November 2, 2026)
The agentic launches that stayed with me last week had nothing to do with how capable a model is. They were about reach. AWS Step Functions , which already orchestrates over 220 AWS services, can now be handed to an agent as a tool, so workflows teams already trust became callable without a rewrite. In the same week, the AI blog published how one engagement platform exposed rou
Introducing the Microsoft Copilot harness in Foundry Agent Service
A model can reason about a task. Completing that task takes more: the right context, tools, execution environment, and controls, and an agent loop that brings them together. Microsoft’s unified harness strategy brings a shared execution foundation across our agent experiences while preserving customer choice. In Microsoft Foundry, that means you can choose a supported model and
Azure Cloud HSM Hardware Audit Logging: Verifiable audit trails for security and compliance
Organizations running regulated and security-sensitive workloads need trusted evidence of which authenticated users performed management operations on their hardware security modules (HSMs), what actions they took, and when. Today, we are announcing Hardware Audit Logging for Azure Cloud HSM , which collects audit records generated by the HSM itself for supported management ope
Scale reservoir uncertainty analysis with agile reservoir modeling
Turn subsurface uncertainty into decision-ready insight Drilling campaigns are among the most expensive and operationally complex activities in the energy industry. Rigs, crews, equipment, and logistics are scheduled months in advance, leaving little room for delay. Every hour of downtime can carry significant costs. Geoscientists and engineers rely on reservoir models to under
AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Polly Generative engine, TorchNeuron for Trainium, and more (October 26, 2026)
A few weeks ago I presented to a small group of commercial and technology leaders from Brazilian agribusiness at the AWS office in São Paulo. My talk ran through where generative AI fits across the different stages of an agribusiness operation, and the point I kept returning to is that the markets we call traditional are exactly the ones where keeping up with this technology de
AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities is now generally available
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities . AWS Continuum is a security service that finds and validates code vulnerabilities, then delivers fixes as patches you can automate or as pull requests in your repositories. AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities confirms which findings are exploitable in your environment, ranks the resu
Advancing digital sovereignty with greater control and choice
Across my conversations with leaders in government, critical infrastructure and regulated industries, one priority consistently rises to the top: putting technology to work on their most important systems while maintaining the control those systems require. This challenge is becoming more important as advanced cloud and AI capabilities move into public services, regulated proce
Introducing Amazon ECS Gateway: A fully-managed ingress solution for ECS services
When platform teams manage containerized applications at scale on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) , configuring ingress networking for each service often becomes a bottleneck. For every new service, teams must provision and connect Application Load Balancers (ALBs) , AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) certificates, AWS WAF web ACLs, and security groups, then keep those
Managing open-weight model risk in enterprise deployments
The growing AI landscape is giving enterprises more choice in how they build, customize, and deploy increasingly capable models. Open-weight models are an important part of that landscape. They give enterprises access to model weights and greater flexibility to inspect, evaluate, modify, and run models within their own environments. While that flexibility can be valuable, it al
Designing for sovereign AI: A shared foundation from edge to cloud
As organizations apply AI to more business-critical and data-intensive workloads, AI processing is moving closer to where data is created, decisions are made, and operations take place. Manufacturers can analyze confidential production data next to the systems that generate it. Pharmaceutical companies can apply AI to clinical trials within controlled environments. Government a
AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Lambda Web Functions, Amazon S3 on the Vercel Marketplace, and more (October 19, 2026)
Nothing last week added a new kind of compute. What it did instead was shorten the distance between the code you already have and that code being live. AWS Lambda learned to run a plain HTTP server with no adapter in front of it, and Amazon S3 became something you can provision from inside the tool you were already using, without opening the AWS Management Console. Different se
Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms
We’re proud to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms . We believe this recognition comes at an important moment for enterprise infrastructure. The question is no longer simply which hypervisor to run. It is how to create a consistent operating model across cloud, datacenter, edge, and sovereign envi
Evolving the cloud-native foundation for the next generation of AI
Building a cloud-native foundation for AI The relationship between model innovation and AI infrastructure has never been more clear; as AI becomes more capable, the platform underneath it matters even more. Agents are fundamentally changing how applications work, and with that, what organizations need from the cloud. Learn how to build a cloud-native AI foundation Cloud-native
Amazon S3 is now available on the Vercel Marketplace and v0 by Vercel
Developers building web and AI applications on Vercel can now add Amazon S3 storage resources directly from the Vercel Marketplace and v0, combining the durability, scalability, and performance of S3 with the convenience of Vercel’s provisioning workflow. Starting today, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) , including Amazon S3 Tables and Amazon S3 Vectors , is natively a
Infrastructure for the frontier era: Scaling intelligence through open industry collaboration
At Microsoft, our vision is to build a Frontier Firm : one where people and technology work together, combining human expertise, context, and judgment with technology that can extend intelligence throughout everyday work. The potential is significant: helping people create, solve complex problems, and make progress on some of society’s most consequential challenges. But realizi
Advancing hardware security with open-source Integrated HSM technology
At this year’s OCP Global Summit , Microsoft announced Project Tessera, the evolution of the Azure Integrated Hardware Security Module (HSM), into a fully open-source initiative developed in collaboration with Marvell®, Oracle, and Open Compute Project (OCP) . Project Tessera advances our broader commitment to open, industrywide standards for platform security. The motivation b
AWS Weekly Roundup: Prime Day 2026 by the numbers, Claude Haiku 5.5, Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic, and more (October 13, 2026)
Some numbers are hard to picture until you sit with them for a moment. Last week we published the Prime Day 2026 metrics, and the one that stuck with me is 2.3 quadrillion: the daily requests Amazon ElastiCache peaked at during the event. Prime Day ran back in June, so this post always lands as a retrospective, and that gap is part of what makes it worth reading. By the time th