Energy at Microsoft Ignite was electric.

Over 20,000 attendees gathered in San Francisco, with 200,000 digitally joining us to explore the future of cloud and AI. What continues to inspire me most are the responses online and the conversations happening in our technical communities.

It’s how quickly you’re turning these announcements into action and building solutions for billions of people, which will ultimately shape our future.

Join us at Microsoft AI Dev Days (Dec 10–11, 2025) and start building

As someone who lives and breathes technical audience marketing across Microsoft Azure, Foundry, Fabric, databases, and developer tools, our Azure platform announcements resonated because they help solve real problems — and now, the work begins.

So, what is everyone saying about the top news? And where do we go from here?

Let’s reflect on the top five cloud and AI stories from Microsoft Ignite across the web right now and then unpack how these innovations can be put into practice across Microsoft AI Dev Days, Microsoft AI Tour and more.

Claude comes to Microsoft Foundry: Choice for builders

The technical community lit up about what Claude models in Microsoft Foundry unlock. One eWeek article described the significance as a partnership that removes one of the biggest historical blockers to adopting new AI tools: vendor complexity.

Developers told us they wanted access to Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus alongside OpenAI’s GPT models. They wanted the ability to select the right models for their use cases and the tools to evaluate for tone, safety, performance and more.

Now Azure is the only cloud supporting access to both Claude and GPT frontier models for its customers.

Response from the community is clear: model diversity matters. When you’re building AI apps and agents, having options means you can optimize for what matters most to your users.

Microsoft Foundry gives you flexibility while maintaining enterprise-grade security, compliance and governance.

IQ Revolution: Semantic understanding that works

The new portfolio of Microsoft IQ offerings has data engineers and architects buzzing. Knowledge is how the shift to agentic AI becomes practical rather than theoretical.

Foundry IQ streamlines knowledge retrieval from multiple sources including SharePoint, Fabric and the web. Powered by Azure AI Search, it delivers policy-aware retrieval without complex custom pipelines.

Designed with Foundry IQ integration, Fabric IQ creates a semantic intelligence layer that unifies analytics, time-series and operational data around shared business concepts.

Azure HorizonDB: PostgreSQL power

PostgreSQL developers are celebrating the preview of Azure HorizonDB. This fully managed, Postgres-compatible database service is designed for modern cloud-native and AI workloads.

Azure HorizonDB delivers higher throughput for transactional workloads, auto-scaling storage and scale-out compute with sub-millisecond commit latencies.

Built-in vector indexing brings AI intelligence directly to where data lives, helping developers build semantic search and RAG patterns without added complexity.

Azure Copilot: Agents change the game

The new Azure Copilot supports the full cloud operations lifecycle with specialized agents for migration, deployment, observability, optimization and troubleshooting.

Migration agents turn weeks of manual discovery into rapid acceleration by scanning environments and auto-generating infrastructure-as-code templates.

Available at no extra cost in the Azure Portal, CLI and Operations Center, Azure Copilot enables proactive cloud modernization.

Azure hardware: Limitless power and security

The latest Azure AI infrastructure hardware showcased at Ignite captured the community’s imagination, including NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and Microsoft’s custom silicon.

Azure’s custom hardware includes Azure Boost DPU and Azure Integrated HSM, delivering performance and security at scale.

Your keyboard, your impact

Announcements at Ignite aren’t endpoints; they’re starting points. You’re the next generation of creators building new agentic experiences.

Your implementations surface insights that shape how Azure evolves. Your real-world patterns drive product decisions.

Create the future with us

Tune into Microsoft AI Dev Days: December 10–11. Two days of live-streamed technical content designed for developers building with Ignite technologies.

Join us at a Microsoft AI Tour location near you with free, hands-on workshops focused on the latest innovations.

Catch up with your tech community through deep-dive Ignite sessions and curated skilling plans to accelerate your career.

What are you building with the latest technologies announced at Ignite? Join the conversation in Azure’s technical community.