Microsoft Foundry
Unit 3 of 8 · Module 1: Plan and prepare to develop AI solutions on Azure
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Why Microsoft Foundry
Here's a choice every team faces on day one: build your AI setup by hand, or use a platform that organizes it for you. The by-hand way works: you provision individual resources, then write apps that call each one directly. Picture a film crew with one trailer and a heap of loose crates: fine for a quick shoot, chaos by the third project. So for anything beyond a tiny experiment, the recommended place to build AI on Azure is Microsoft Foundry. It's the studio lot: it keeps your projects organized, looks after the resources behind them, and hands you the tools, all in one place.
The portal and the SDK
You can work in Foundry two ways, and most people use both. The Foundry portal is the visual way, in your browser: you click, configure, and test, like walking the lot with a clipboard. The Foundry SDK does the same jobs in code, so a script can build and repeat them for you.
Resources and projects
The heart of Foundry is the project. A project is your team's sound stage: your connections, data, code, and agents live there, set apart from other teams. Each project sits inside one Foundry resource, which is the studio lot itself, in Azure. The lot supplies what every stage shares: compute, storage, model deployments, security settings, and AI services. A single lot can hold several projects, and one of them is marked as the default.
Models and agents
So what happens on each stage? First, the models: the stars of the show. They're deployments from the Foundry Models catalog, with models from Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, and others. Your apps reach a deployment through the project endpoint, with the Foundry SDK, or through the Azure OpenAI endpoint, with the OpenAI SDK. Then come the agents: a model plus its instructions and its tools, packaged as one named entity, like an actor with a script and a bag of props. An agent can automate a task, work with users, and team up with other agents. You create and run them with the Foundry Agent Service, through the project endpoint.
Tools and knowledge
Every good actor needs props, and every agent needs tools. Some come built in, like web search, or a code interpreter that runs Python for you. Others are custom tools, yours or a partner's, plugged in through the Model Context Protocol, MCP, a bit like a universal socket. Foundry also has a truck full of ready-made AI services, called Foundry Tools: text analysis, speech to text and back, translation, and content understanding. Those services are hosted on the lot itself, the Foundry resource, so every project can use them. And for knowledge, an agent uses tools to look things up in your own data, so its answers stand on real facts. Foundry IQ makes that easier still: one central knowledge connection, over MCP.
Portal, SDK, and why it works
This split, team work on the stages and shared services on the lot, suits the most common job: building chat apps and agents. Teams get just enough central control, with very little administration. In practice, most projects start in the portal. You find, compare, deploy, and try out models. You create agents and test them. You connect tools and knowledge, explore Foundry Tools, manage settings and who has access, and copy the endpoints and keys your apps need. And whatever you did by clicking, the SDK can script, even inside a CICD pipeline that runs on every change.
A note on classic projects
One last note, so older guides don't confuse you. What you've seen is the latest way Foundry is organized: one resource, with projects inside. Older setups, now called classic, were built around a hub, with separate pieces wired to it. Those still open in the classic portal, while the new portal interface is where new features land. So when a tutorial talks about hubs, you'll know it's describing the classic model.
Facts from Microsoft's documentation: What is Microsoft Foundry?; Microsoft Foundry architecture (CC BY 4.0), rewritten in Loop's own words and examples. Narration, animation, and quiz by Loop. Microsoft, Azure, and Microsoft Foundry are trademarks of Microsoft. Loop is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.