Blog

Technical depth on AI, Azure, Next.js, and the engineering decisions behind them.

21 posts

GPT-6 Astra migration on Azure: the GPT-5.6 Sol checklist

GPT-5.6 Sol retires on Foundry in January 2028, so moving to GPT-6 Astra is a choice rather than a deadline, and it touches more than a deployment name: tool calls must move to the Responses API, effort none and temperature disappear, and every line on the price sheet costs 2 to 2.5 times more. A phase-by-phase checklist built on Microsoft's migration process, OpenAI's model guidance and the Learn pages, with the Swedish residency caveat that keeps part of your traffic on Sol.

September 11, 202635 viewsAzure & Cloud

GPT-6 Astra in Foundry: the price, the gate and the EU gap

GPT-6 Astra arrived in Microsoft Foundry on 3 September 2026 at $10/$50 per million tokens, the same list price as Claude Fable 5.1 and 2.5x GPT-5.6 Sol on promo, behind a Limited Access gate and with no EU Data Zone. The cost math on document jobs and 60-turn agent loops, the 272K long-context cliff, what the Critical cyber rating means for refusals, and how a Swedish team should handle residency until the EU zone lands at its new 20% premium.

September 4, 20262,773 viewsAzure & Cloud

Claude Fable 5.1 in Foundry: cache math and the EU caveats

Claude Fable 5.1 keeps Fable 5's $10/$50 pricing but cuts cache reads to $0.25 per million tokens, which turns a 60-turn agent session from $17.25 into $10.50 and shrinks the premium over Opus 5 from 2x to about 22%. On Microsoft Foundry it ships Anthropic-hosted only, with no EU data zone, no Batches API, a zero default quota on pay-as-you-go, mandatory 30-day retention until Enterprise Frontier Safeguards arrive, and three breaking changes for teams migrating from Fable 5.

September 3, 2026513 viewsAzure & Cloud

Foundry EU Data Zone premium doubles: the Swedish cost math

From 1 September 2026 Microsoft Foundry charges 20 percent over Global for EU Data Zone deployments, up from 10 percent, and 30 percent for Sweden Central regional, while Global pricing stays flat and West Europe regional hits 50 percent. Pay-as-you-go customers only pay the new rate on models launched from today, PTU customers pay immediately, and GPT-5.6 is not yet on regional Standard in Sweden, so here is the cost math and a six-step checklist.

September 1, 2026362 viewsAzure & Cloud

Cohere Parse v5 in Foundry: document parsing cost math

Cohere Parse v5 landed in Microsoft Foundry on 27 August 2026 at $1.50 per 1,000 pages, the same price as Document Intelligence Read and under a third of Content Understanding's layout meter. We price all four Azure document parsers in Sweden Central at 100k, 1M and 10M pages a month, then weigh the saving against Parse's missing confidence scores, absent Swedish language support and preview-only status.

August 31, 2026197 viewsAzure & Cloud

Azure Assistants API retired: migrating to Foundry Agents

The Azure OpenAI Assistants API reached its retirement date on 26 August 2026, and the classic Foundry Agent Service it underpins retires 31 March 2027. A step-by-step migration guide to the new Foundry Agent Service on the Responses API: threads become conversations, runs become responses, assistants become versioned agents, and Microsoft's migration tool rewrites code but not stored state.

August 28, 2026383 viewsAzure & Cloud

Azure OpenAI cost check: GPT-5.6 price cuts and PTU math

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80 percent and Terra by 20 percent on 30 July 2026, and Microsoft confirmed the same decreases reach Azure OpenAI Global Standard deployments from 1 August. For Swedish and EU teams running these models on Azure, the cuts move the break-even point for PTU reservations, model routing and residency premiums, so the autumn budget math deserves a fresh pass before any new one-year commitments.

August 3, 2026446 viewsAzure & Cloud

Sovereign AI on Azure: what the Microsoft-Mistral deal means

Microsoft and Mistral announced an expanded partnership on 21 July 2026: Mistral Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 arrive in Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio, deployable from Azure cloud to customer-controlled and fully air-gapped Azure Local environments, backed by a multibillion-dollar European GPU buildout. We compare the three deployment modes and what each one solves for Swedish public sector and regulated industries.

July 24, 2026231 viewsAzure & Cloud

Azure HorizonDB vs PostgreSQL pgvector vs AI Search for RAG

Azure HorizonDB reached public preview at Build 2026: a PostgreSQL-compatible, scale-out engine with vector search built in, up to 128 TB of storage and Sweden Central among the five launch regions. For RAG embeddings on Azure the choice now runs three ways, decided by where the source data lives, how much retrieval quality matters and how close you are to Flexible Server's vertical-scaling ceiling.

June 8, 2026145 viewsAzure & Cloud