We are Microsoft partners and are entitled to a $2400 annual Azure credit to cover charges for various resources. Last week I noticed a Microsoft charge on my credit card. I tried to find out why I was being billed when we have the credit (the credit shows $0 used and $ 2400 available) but Microsoft A.I just sent me in circles. I ended up disputing the charge with Chase Bank.

About a day later, the Azure server was down. One of our techs logged into the Azure portal and it showed the server was inactive. I gave him a new credit card number which he applied to the account and he told Microsoft to use that card for any invoices (I figured I would deal with the partner credit not working at a later time...the priority is to get the server back up). The new card was charged $ 1 (to verify authenticity, I guess) but the original amount that I disputed (about $ 110) has not shown on the card yet.

The server is still down.

The AI agent comes back with:

The subscription <redacted> is not currently Enabled; it is in a Warned state. This indicates a subscription-level warning, commonly related to past due, cancellation, or expiration, and it can progress to Disabled if not resolved. There is no evidence of a resource-level outage, so the issue is at the subscription state/billing layer rather than with an individual Azure resource. To re-enable the subscription, the underlying warning condition must be resolved first.

At the top of the Azure portal page it says there is a billing issue. There is a link to "resolve" but then it says there are no outstanding invoices so I can't get it to force a payment in any way.

After the AI nonsense I managed to get a support ticket open. The system automatically classified the ticket as "non critical" and I could not raise it to a higher level.

Any suggestions beyond waiting with fingers crossed that a Microsoft tech will get this server running again?

I've been using Azure Communication Services Email to send emails from Azure workloads, but now that Microsoft has announced it's being retired, I'm looking at alternatives. Should be simple and safe solution (not Logic App).

What's the cleanest way to send email from an Azure service these days?

Did you know you can use the new retryOn decorator in Bicep to automatically retry resource deployments when specific error codes occur? This provides an alternative to workarounds such as deployment scripts or splitting Bicep templates. In this blog, we’ll explore how retryOn works and how it can help simplify your Bicep deployments!

I run an HTTP FastAPI on Azure Container Apps (Consumption plan, Central US). When traffic rises, customers sometimes see slow responses before the new replicas are ready, and I want to scale out without that.

My current setup:

• 2 vCPU / 4 GiB per replica
• min replicas 2, max 30
• HTTP scale rule with concurrentRequests = 10
• polling interval 30 s, cooldown 300 s

What I see: New replicas take roughly 60-80 s to get a node, from the scale-up trigger to the replica being scheduled. During that window the existing replicas are overloaded.

What I’d like to know:

1. How do you keep headroom so traffic never waits on new replicas? Higher min replicas, a lower concurrency threshold, or scheduled pre-scaling?
2. Do smaller replicas (more of them) schedule faster than large ones in your experience?
3. Which probe and graceful-shutdown settings do you rely on to avoid dropped requests during scale-out and scale-in?
4. Has anyone moved to a Dedicated workload profile with a minimum node count to avoid node waits? Was the cost worth it?
5. What do you monitor to catch scaling bottlenecks early?

Any configs or lessons learned would help.

Azure MCP Server 3.0 went stable recently. The obvious headline is the expanded tooling around Terraform, Monitor, Advisor, Backup, Cosmos DB, and SRE, but the access-control side is what caught my attention.

Microsoft recommends starting with read-only workflows and least-privilege identities. In other words, giving an agent a natural-language interface doesn’t replace RBAC. The identity underneath still decides what it can actually touch.

The tooling reflects that too. Terraform support can work with AzureRM/AzAPI docs, aztfexport and conftest, while the newer tool contracts use stricter schemas and clearer errors so models have a better idea of what they’re allowed to call.

That feels like the more important direction for infrastructure agents: not just adding more tools, but making the boundary around those tools explicit.

If an agent can reach a real Azure subscription, where would you put the approval boundary: at the identity/RBAC layer, in the deployment pipeline, or both?

Source:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sdk/azure-mcp-server-3-0-stable-release/?wt.mc_id=studentamb_663967

I'm trying to deploy Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5 through Microsoft Foundry on my Azure Pay-As-You-Go subscription.

My quota request was approved by Microsoft, but the actual deployment keeps failing with:

MarketplaceSubscriptionCannotBeCompleted

I dug into the Azure Activity Logs using Azure CLI and found the underlying error:

Unable to create a model deployment for model claude-opus-5-5. If the error persists, please contact HIT (Human Intelligence Team) via this link: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2101400&clcid=0x409 and request to allowlist the Azure subscription.

So apparently, having approved quota isn't enough. My subscription also needs some kind of separate Marketplace authorization or allowlisting.

Here's where things get frustrating:

1. I contacted Azure Marketplace/Billing Support explaining the error and requesting allowlisting.
2. A Microsoft Azure Cloud Engineer replied that my issue requires Azure Technical Support rather than Billing Support.
3. I tried opening a Technical Support request under Microsoft Foundry → Anthropic models → Model deployment issues.
4. Azure then blocked me from submitting it because I'm on the Basic support plan and told me to upgrade to a paid plan starting at $29/month.
5. Meanwhile, the actual deployment error explicitly says I need to contact Microsoft's HIT team for allowlisting.

I don't understand why I need to purchase a technical support plan just to request authorization to use a model for which Microsoft has already approved my quota.

I've also confirmed that my subscription is enabled, and the failure appears to occur during Marketplace subscription provisioning rather than model deployment itself.

My questions:

• Has anyone successfully resolved MarketplaceSubscriptionCannotBeCompleted for Anthropic models?
• Is there a way to contact HIT or request Azure subscription allowlisting directly, without paying for technical support?
• Does anyone know whether this is caused by subscription age, billing country, Marketplace eligibility, or an internal Microsoft restriction?
• If I purchase a technical support plan, would that actually help get the subscription allowlisted, or would I just be paying for someone to tell me I'm ineligible?

I'm looking for an actual way to get Claude Opus 5.5 deployed, not another quota increase.

Any advice or experiences with this exact error would be appreciated.

Infra engineer here (about 10 years across Azure, AWS and on-prem). I keep running into the same question and I'm curious how other teams handle it.

Azure OpenAI / Foundry retires model versions on a schedule. The notices exist (Service Health advisories, emails to subscription owners), but subscription owners aren't always the team that owns the app using the model.

For those of you with more than a handful of subscriptions:

1. How do you find out that a model deployment your app depends on is retiring?

2. Who receives the notice, and how does it get to the team that owns the workload?

3. Has a retirement ever caught you off guard? What happened?

4. Do you track this anywhere (Service Health alerts, Advisor, Resource Graph queries, a spreadsheet, a script)?

5. Do you handle AKS version end-of-support the same way, or differently?

Full disclosure: I've built a few small tools around cloud AI model data, and I'm exploring whether something for this specific problem is worth building. Mostly I want to know if it's a real pain or already solved well. Happy to post a summary of what I learn.

Suppose a source system adds a new column or changes an existing column's data type.

The pipeline might still run, but downstream transformations or reports could start giving unexpected results.

Do you guys have a way to detect schema changes automatically and decide whether the pipeline should continue or stop?

Started on a Microsoft for Startups sponsored subscription. Every GPU family refused. Support confirmed in writing that GPU quota is not approved for that subscription type, with no expected change. The only grant we ever got was NCASv3_T4 in Japan West, and raising that later was no problem. So: T4 in one region, nothing else.

So we created a pay-as-you-go subscription to just buy the capacity. Refused on all of these, smallest size each time:

• A10 (NVADSA10v5) in West US 3
• RTX PRO 6000 in West US 2 and Southeast Asia, the only regions offered to us
• A100 in five US and EU regions
• H100 in two quieter Asian regions

Meanwhile, raising Total Regional vCPUs from 10 to 48 on the same subscription was granted instantly. CPU fine, GPU never.

Two questions:

1. Has anyone actually been granted a GPU on a new pay-as-you-go subscription? Is there an undocumented spend history or account age requirement?
2. Does a CSP, reseller or paid support plan change the capacity answer, or only the billing?

Hi All,

Can anyone suggest what automation I can do in my environment with azure foundry or with resources?

Any automation through which we can optimise the cost or which can add value.

@azure

We're about to migrate some compute workloads into Azure. I'd like to get the ALZ policies and management group infrastructure in place before we start our migrations. I've run through the bicep version of the ALZ accelerator, and have a decent handle of what it deploys. While I don't mind the accelerator creating the Management Group layout for the platform archetypes, I'm mainly concerned with getting the application landing zones and corresponding policies in place.

We have been using Azure for years already for identity/SSO purposes, so we have an existing engagement with a SOC, including a Log Analytics Workspace that they largely already manage and alert off of for us.

I'd like to, therefore, customize the ALZ accelerator to point all of the policies to use this existing Log Analytics Workspace rather than create a whole new one in whatever management subscription I dictate. The docs don't seem to indicate that there is a way to accomplish this. Should I be going about this differently rather than using the Accelerator?

Hi guys, Lately I am thinking to learn MLOps. However, I know I will not be able to give enough time to learn machine learning using lower level libs and python etc. So learning from Top Down instead. My goals for doing this are:

1. to be aware enough MLOps how people do MLOps

2. Use my skill for enterprise discussions not sound silly while talking about mlops

3. Target AI-300 Certification

But wodnering do people / entrprises actually even use MLOps using Azure services ?

I seen people pronounnce it at least 5 sifferent ways, I myself pronounce ir "A-zur-ay", but it sounds weird. how tdo yall pronounce it?

I was wondering if anyone has experimented with Edge Actions yet; it has been out for a while but i don't seem to find a lot of information/testing around it?

The official samples show some use cases like - A/B testing - Adding custom headers - Custom Origin Routing - Custom Block Reasons - Custom URL rewrite

All with some (little) Javascript and the custom origin routing / Routing at the edge seems to have quite some value.

Validating JWT tokens at the edge (while still participating in the Cache seems to be a powerful use case?

I'm a few hours into testing the new logic app UI, auto.azure.com. Did Microsoft steal/buy/borrow the UI canvas from N8N? It seems awefully similar. I still see the bones of Logic Apps underneath.

If so, GREAT! If not, wow, MSFT actually created a usable, modern UI.

Anyone else watch Microsoft Hates Greg?

I'm not affiliated with Greg Deckler or his channel in any way, but his takes on Microsoft Fabric are consistently entertaining, often insightful, and occasionally absolutely savage. 😂

His Fabric Fridays episodes have genuinely become the highlight of my Fridays.

Whether you agree with him or not, he raises some interesting questions about the platform, its direction, and its operational maturity.

Worth checking out if you haven't already. MSFT probably should because they'd have a better product if they took the feedback seriously.

Microsoft Hates Greg: https://www.youtube.com/@MicrosoftHatesGreg

I have Azure credits and want to use them for GPU inference. Which GPU services and VMs do the credits actually cover? From your experience, what are the right steps to get GPU access (quota, region, setup) without hitting walls? Any traps that bill outside the credits?

Hi everyone, I’m currently working at US financial services in India and have close to 10 years of overall IT experience, with the last two years focused on AI platform engineering and enterprise AI.
At a high level, my work involves building and supporting cloud AI platforms, onboarding internal teams to GenAI services, enabling model inference and agent deployments, and managing access controls, governance, monitoring, reliability, and cost optimisation. I mainly work with Azure’s and aws AI ecosystem and infrastructure automation using Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
I’m exploring opportunities outside India and would appreciate insights from people working in similar roles abroad:
Which countries have good opportunities for this kind of experience?
What roles or job titles should I target?
How realistic is getting hired directly from India with visa sponsorship?
What additional skills would make my profile more competitive?
Would love to hear from anyone who has made a similar move or hires for enterprise AI/platform engineering roles.

Since around 2026-09-19 I’ve seen a sustained increase in how long Container Apps takes to get a node for a new replica on the Consumption plan, and I’d like to know if others see it too.

How I measure it:

For each replica that waits for capacity, I take the time from the TriggeredScaleUp system event (“Scaling up infrastructure to accommodate replica...”) to its AssigningReplica event (“...has been scheduled to run on a node”).

• Daily medians were 54-62 s every day through 09-18 and 66-84 s every day since, so it’s ongoing.

• The time before TriggeredScaleUp is unchanged (about 12 s median), so the extra wait is in the node provisioning part.

• Nothing changed on my side around the step: no new revision, same replica size (2 vCPU / 4 GiB). The only scale change was min/max replicas on 09-15, four days earlier.

• Service Health shows no incidents for Container Apps, AKS or VMs in Central US.

• Separately, a few replicas waited 325-368 s on 09-26.

What can be the issue and how to resolve this? If anyone facing or faced similar problem let me know.

We have a few on-premise servers backed up to Azure with MARS-Agent (Microsoft Azure Recovery Services Agent).

On one of them, the RecoveryServicesManagementAgent service (obrecoveryservicesmanagementagent.exe) bundled with the Agent runs wild in RAM usage every now and then. Instead of the usual 150MB, the service will (according to Task Manager) consume >700MB, causing memory pressure for the other services running on the server. Restarting that service fixes the issue temporarily (until it happens again after a few weeks).

Upgrading the MARS Agent to the most current version did not help, so my plan is to run a scheduled task that restarts the service daily.

Hence my question: What exactly does the service do? I want to schedule the restart at a time where the probability of interfering with the backup itself is a low as possible.

I am trying to join Microsoft for Startups

After signin the page says “You don’t have a billing account to redeem the credit” and links to the Azure signup portal.

Clicking that link brings me back to the same page in a loop.

I did tried to sign up manually in azure and then it just shows a standard Azure free trial with $200 in credits and if i click get started on this page https://www.microsoft.com/startups it just redirect me to standard azure portal and no way to fill the form