8/13/25, 1:49 AM What is Azure AI Foundry?
- Azure AI Foundry | Microsoft Learn
What is Azure AI Foundry?
08/11/2025
Azure AI Foundry is a unified Azure platform-as-a-service offering for enterprise AI operations,
model builders, and application development. This foundation combines production-grade
infrastructure with friendly interfaces, enabling developers to focus on building applications rather
than managing infrastructure.
Azure AI Foundry unifies agents, models, and tools under a single management grouping with
built-in enterprise-readiness capabilities including tracing, monitoring, evaluations, and
customizable enterprise setup configurations. The platform provides streamlined management
through unified Role-based access control (RBAC), networking, and policies under one Azure
resource provider namespace.
Azure AI Foundry is designed for developers to:
Build generative AI applications and AI agents on an enterprise-grade platform.
Explore, build, test, and deploy using cutting-edge AI tools and ML models, grounded in
responsible AI practices.
Collaborate with a team for the full life-cycle of application development.
Work across model providers with a consistent API contract.
With Azure AI Foundry, you can explore a wide variety of models, services and capabilities, and
get to building AI applications that best serve your goals. Azure AI Foundry facilitates scalability
for transforming proof of concepts into full-fledged production applications with ease.
Continuous monitoring and refinement support long-term success.
Work in an Azure AI Foundry project
An Azure AI Foundry project is where you do most of your development work. You can work with
your project in the Azure AI Foundry portal, or use the SDK in your preferred development
environment.
Azure AI Foundry projects provide developers with self-serve capabilities to independently create
new environments for exploring ideas and building prototypes, while managing data in isolation.
Projects act as secure units of isolation and collaboration where agents share file storage, thread
storage (conversation history), and search indexes. You can also bring your own Azure resources
for compliance and control over sensitive data.
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Azure AI Foundry API and SDKs
The Azure AI Foundry API is designed specifically for building agentic applications and provides a
consistent contract for working across different model providers. The API is complemented by
SDKs to make it easy to integrate AI capabilities into your applications. SDK Client libraries are
available for:
Python
C#
JavaScript/TypeScript (preview)
Java (preview)
The Azure AI Foundry for VS Code Extension helps you explore models and develop agents
directly in your development environment.
Types of projects
Azure AI Foundry supports two types of projects: a hub-based project and a Foundry project. In
most cases, you want to use a Foundry project.
A Foundry project is built on an Azure AI Foundry resource. This project type allows for a
simple setup, access to agents, and industry leading models from OpenAI, Mistral, Meta, and
more.
A hub-based project is hosted by an Azure AI Foundry hub. If your company has an
administrative team that created a hub for you, you can create a project from that hub. If
you're working on your own, you can create a project and a default hub is automatically be
created for you.
To understand the how the newer Foundry project differs from the hub-based project, see
New Foundry projects overview.
Which type of project do I need?
In general, you should use a Foundry project if you're looking to build agents or work with
models.
Use a hub-based project when you need features that aren't available in a Foundry project.
See the following table for more on feature availability.
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７ Note
New agents and model-centric capabilities are only available on Foundry projects, including
access to the Azure AI Foundry API and Azure AI Foundry Agent Service in general
availability. To migrate your hub-based project to a Foundry project, see Migrate from hub-
based to Foundry projects.
This table summarizes features available in the two project types:
ﾉ Expand table
Capability Foundry hub-based project
project
Agents ✅ (GA) ✅ (Preview only)
AI Foundry API to work with agents and across models ✅ (Native Available via connections
support)
Models sold directly by Azure - Azure OpenAI, DeepSeek, ✅ Available via connections
xAI, etc.
Partner & Community Models sold through Marketplace - ✅ Available via connections
Stability, Bria, Cohere, etc.
Open source models such as HuggingFace ✅
Evaluations ✅ ✅
Playground ✅ ✅
Prompt flow ✅
Content understanding ✅ ✅
Project files (directly upload files and start experimenting) ✅
Project-level isolation of files and outputs ✅ ✅
Required Azure dependencies - Azure Storage account,
Azure Key Vault
How do I know which type of project I have?
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Here are some of the ways to identify your project type:
From the breadcrumb navigation section
A Foundry project displays (AI Foundry) on the second line
A hub-based project displays (Hub) on the second line
From the All resources page
A Foundry project displays (AI Foundry) as the parent resource
A hub-based project displays (Hub) as the parent resource
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Navigate in the Azure AI Foundry portal
In the Azure AI Foundry portal, you can navigate among all your resources using the breadcrumbs
at the top of the page. The breadcrumbs show recent resources, along with a link to all resources.
The left pane is organized around your goals. Generally, as you develop with Azure AI, you'll likely
go through a few distinct stages of project development:
Define and explore. In this stage you define your project goals, and then explore and test
models and services against your use case to find the ones that enable you to achieve your
goals.
Build and customize. In this stage, you're actively building solutions and applications with
the models, tools, and capabilities you selected. You can also customize models to perform
better for your use case by fine-tuning, grounding in your data, and more. Building and
customizing might be something you choose to do in the Azure AI Foundry portal, or
through code and the Azure AI Foundry SDKs. Either way, a project provides you with
everything you need.
Once you're actively developing in your project, the Overview page shows the things you
want easy access to, like your endpoints and keys.
Observe and improve. In this stage, you're looking for where you can improve your
application's performance. You might choose to use tools like tracing to debug your
application or compare evaluations to hone in on how you want your application to behave.
You can also integrate with safety & security systems so you can be confident when you take
your application to production.
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If you're an admin, or leading a development team, and need to manage the team's resources,
project access, quota, and more, you can do that in the Management Center.
Customize the left pane
The left pane of the Azure AI Foundry portal is your main navigation tool. Customize this area to
show the parts of the portal you want to use.
Pin or unpin items into the left pane. When you unpin an item, it's hidden from the left pane but
can be found again in the ...More menu.
Select ... More at the bottom of the pane to see items to pin and unpin.
Customize each project separately. The left pane isn't shared across projects.
The left pane isn't shared across users. Each user customizes their own left pane for each
project.
Management center
The management center is a part of the Azure AI Foundry portal that streamlines governance and
management activities. In the management center, you can view and manage:
Projects and resources
Quotas and usage metrics
Govern access and permissions
For more information, see Management center overview.
Pricing and billing
Azure AI Foundry is monetized through individual products customer access and consume in the
platform, including API and models, complete AI toolchain, and responsible AI and enterprise
grade production at scale products. Each product has its own billing model and price.
The platform is free to use and explore. Pricing occurs at deployment level.
Using Azure AI Foundry also incurs cost associated with the underlying services. To learn more,
read Plan and manage costs for Azure AI services.
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Region availability
Azure AI Foundry is available in most regions where Azure AI services are available. For more
information, see region support for Azure AI Foundry.
How to get access
You can explore Azure AI Foundry portal (including the model catalog) without signing in.
But for full functionality, you need an Azure account .
Related content
Quickstart: Get started with Azure AI Foundry
Create a project
Get started with an AI template
） Note: The author created this article with assistance from AI. Learn more
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