1. Introduction
What is Azure AI Foundry?
Azure AI Foundry is Microsoft's unified platform for building, deploying, and managing AI applications at scale. It brings together model catalog, agent service, RAG pipelines, API management, and governance under one hub.
Key Capabilities
- Model Catalog — Access OpenAI, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, and open-source models
- Agent Service — Build and host AI agents with tools, memory, and guardrails
- AI Search — Hybrid vector + keyword search for RAG
- AI Gateway — Rate limiting, content safety, and MCP support
- Foundry IQ — Agentic retrieval with knowledge bases
- Multi-Modal — Document Intelligence, PII masking, image analysis
What You Will Build
- AI agents with tools, memory, and MCP servers
- End-to-end RAG pipelines with Azure AI Search
- API gateways with rate limiting and content safety
- Multi-modal apps for document processing
- Multi-agent orchestration and A2A communication
💡 Key Insight: Foundry unifies the entire AI lifecycle — from experimentation (model playground) to production (agent service with governance).
✏️ Exercise: List three real-world applications you could build with Foundry. For each, identify which capabilities (agent, RAG, gateway, multi-modal) are most relevant.