Posts tagged with "Azure API Management"

On 3 September 2026, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all suffered outages on the same afternoon, each from an independent cause: a routing error at OpenAI, an infrastructure issue at Anthropic and a compute-centre failure behind Grok. A runtime failover plan for Azure teams: Foundry's model router with automatic fallback, APIM's AI gateway and circuit breaker, what redundancy really costs, and the Data Zone and DORA constraints that shape it.

The MCP core maintainers published a new roadmap on 22 August 2026, four weeks after the 2026-07-28 spec made the protocol core stateless: five priorities covering agentic messaging, HTTP-native transport unification, agent identity with DPoP and Workload Identity Federation, improved primitives, and SDK developer experience. Here is how Azure-first EU teams should sort that list into adopt now, prepare, and watch.

The Model Context Protocol specification version 2026-07-28 shipped on 28 July with a stateless core, Multi Round-Trip Requests, required routing headers, cacheable list results and a hardened authorization model that deprecates Dynamic Client Registration in favour of Client ID Metadata Documents. All four Tier 1 SDKs shipped support on release day, so Azure teams running MCP servers on Container Apps, AKS or behind API Management can start migrating immediately.

MCP's 2026-07-28 release candidate removes the initialize handshake and the Mcp-Session-Id header, so every request is self-contained and Azure-hosted MCP servers can run behind plain load balancers without sticky sessions or Redis session stores. Tasks and MCP Apps land as formal extensions, six SEPs harden authorization around OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, and Roots, Sampling and Logging enter a 12-month deprecation window.

Microsoft Ignite BRK116: Deploy AI agents at scale with Azure App Service, AI Foundry, and MCP tools. Built-in observability, governance, security. Hitachi case study shows 73% downtime reduction and 41% cost savings.