The new Azure AI Foundry, a unified platform which might become software development's next big thing

Microsoft is introducing the Azure AI Foundry SDK, a new tool designed to make it easy for developers to build AI-powered apps. The SDK is available today in Python and C#, with a new JavaScript version, and offers a range of pre-built app templates.

In a blog post, Microsoft says the idea is to give developers a simple interface for accessing some of Microsoft’s most popular models and models from OpenAI, Meta, Mistral AI, Cohere, and AI21 Labs. Microsoft says that the Azure AI Foundry SDK also includes tools for evaluating, debugging, and improving the quality of AI-powered applications across development, testing, and production environments.

With the SDK, developers can access Microsoft’s models with a few lines of code and connect to the Azure AI OpenAI Service. This new service provides access to OpenAI’s GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4, and GPT-4 Turbo models, which feature data residency, scalability, and security.

The SDK supports Azure AI’s model inference, search, agent services, tracing, evaluation, and more. It can be used alongside various development tools, including GitHub, Visual Studio, Copilot Studio, and Azure AI Projects. This new Azure AI feature consolidates the capabilities for building and managing AI-powered apps.

The Azure AI Foundry portal (formerly Azure AI Studio) has been updated with new capabilities for managing and deploying AI-powered apps. Developers can now create AI projects to manage resources like models, data, and agents. Meanwhile, AI Application Templates can deploy apps to Azure with infrastructure-as-code.

In other news, Microsoft just announced the new Windows 365 Link Mini PC, which can access the new Azure AI Foundry through the cloud.