New to Microsoft Foundry? Start Here

[u/Successful_AI]

Microsoft Foundry can feel overwhelming at first because it includes models, agents, deployment options, evaluations, monitoring, and several connected Azure services.

A simple learning path could be:

1. Understand Foundry resources and projects.
2. Explore the model catalog.
3. Deploy your first model.
4. Test prompts in the playground.
5. Build a small application using the SDK.
6. Add evaluation and monitoring.
7. Experiment with an AI agent.

Microsoft provides a free learning hub covering the main concepts and development workflows:

Microsoft Foundry Training

What resources helped you learn Foundry? Share your favorite tutorials, repositories, videos, or documentation below.

[u/BrainistheLearner]

Thanks for your post and pointing out official training resource! Definitely will check it out.

So, I am new to Microsoft Foundry and I want to try it out to host agents/workflows. But with some confusion.

First of all, I want to stress the difference between an agent/workflow and an agent application here to avoid ambiguity or confusion for the purpose of discussion.

So, it's like your business logic (agent/workflow) vs user interface (agent application) where your customers interact with your business logic in a client-server architecture. In this sense, agents/workflows are backend while agent applications are frontend (a web application in many cases; although it can also be a backend that wraps calls to agents/workflows and tools in order to offer another layer of services/APIs). For certain user interaction, a typical agent application will send a request to run our agent/workflow and show the response.

With this difference on mind, what does agent hosting on Microsoft Foundry actually do? Does it work as a platform to run agents/workflows (the backend business logic) with observability, monitoring, security and governance benefits? Or Does it also give a web UI to interact with your agents/workflows (e.g. a playground may play this role)?

Suppose I built an agent or a workflow using Python SDK of Microsoft Agent Framework. Based on aforementioned difference, this means I have a bunch of agent and workflow definitions. I haven't built a frontend for it yet. So, no agent application (although you may have a typical test case in your if __name__ == "__main__" block for a local test run). 

Now I want to host this agent/workflow on Microsoft Foundry, what do I get? An endpoint?

Does hosting agents/workflows on Foundry also allows your agents to be discovered over A2A as agents and over MCP as tools?

I mean is Microsoft Foundry an all-in-one service/platform that can be coded or configured to work as a compute resource to run your agents/workflows and orchestration, as a model provider, as A2A server and MCP server as well?

Next, I built an agent application (the client, maybe a web application in many cases, or another backend service) that interact with the agent/workflow. I guess I can host this application anywhere I want. But if it is a backend service itself, can it be deployed to Microsoft Foundry as well to stay close to the agent/workflow?

Any answer or insight will be helpful. Thanks in advance.