Azure AI Foundry Agent Service
Fully managed Azure platform for building, deploying, and scaling AI agents that combine a Foundry-catalog model, instructions, and tools, with built-in identity, content safety, tracing, evaluation, and three agent shapes (prompt, workflow, hosted-container).
Description
Foundry Agent Service hosts and scales agents on Azure-managed runtime. An agent is a model from the Foundry catalog plus instructions plus tools; the service handles tool execution, conversation state, Microsoft Entra identity, content filters, virtual-network isolation, tracing into Application Insights, and a build-test-deploy-monitor lifecycle with immutable versioning. Three agent types coexist: prompt agents (configuration-only), workflow agents (declarative YAML or visual designer for sequential / group-chat / human-in-the-loop orchestrations), and hosted agents (your container running Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, or custom code, per-session VM-isolated). The catalog of built-in tools includes Web Search, Code Interpreter, File Search, Azure AI Search, Function calling, OpenAPI tools, Image Generation, Browser Automation, Computer Use, plus MCP and A2A as custom tool surfaces.
Solution
Managed agent runtime around a Foundry-catalog model. Prompt agents run a single-agent tool-use loop: model reasons over instructions, the service decides whether to call a built-in tool (web search, code interpreter, file search, MCP, OpenAPI, function call), executes, observes, continues. Workflow agents bind that loop into a declarative graph of nodes (agent invocation, if/else, for-each, human-in-the-loop, group chat) defined in YAML or the visual designer. Hosted agents replace the inner loop with user code in a per-session VM-isolated sandbox that calls Foundry models, Toolbox MCP, and the Responses / Invocations / Activity / A2A protocols. Every run is traced, versioned, and gated by content filters and Entra identity.
Primary use cases
- no-code prompt agents in the Foundry portal
- declarative multi-step workflows that orchestrate agents and business logic
- containerized custom-code agents (Agent Framework / LangGraph / Semantic Kernel) on managed VMs
- enterprise tool integration via MCP, OpenAPI, and Azure connectors
- publishing agents to Microsoft 365, Teams, and the Entra Agent Registry
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