Microsoft's guidance is clear that AI workloads belong in ordinary application landing zones. What changes is the order of work. Some Foundry networking choices are fixed the moment the resource is created, so they have to be settled before the first model is deployed. This guide covers placement, private endpoints and DNS, agent network isolation, keyless identity, the renamed Foundry roles, policy, the AI gateway, quotas and regions, checked against Microsoft's documentation in September 2026.
Most Azure waste is not a bad architecture decision. It is a meter that kept running after its reason ended: a disk left behind by a deleted VM, a public IP nobody released, an empty App Service plan, a reservation nobody watches. This list covers seven common leaks, with how to find each one, how to fix it, and whether policy can stop it coming back, checked against Microsoft's documentation in September 2026.
Azure budgets alert, they do not stop spending, and every cost alert in Azure works on data that is hours or days old. This guide separates preventive guardrails (Azure Policy, quotas, subscription vending) from detective ones (budgets, anomaly alerts, Advisor), shows the latency gap between them, and proposes a baseline that puts each control at the right scope. Checked against Microsoft's documentation in September 2026.
Azure OpenAI in Microsoft Foundry Models has three billing shapes: pay per token, reserve capacity in provisioned throughput units, or accept a 24-hour target turnaround for half price with Batch. This guide explains where tokens come from in an agent turn, how PTU sizing and reservations work, when spillover helps, and how to monitor spend, with every claim checked against Microsoft's documentation in September 2026.
A field-tested strategy for moving a VMware estate to Azure without pretending lift-and-shift is easy: how to run the provider evaluation, design waves around downtime tolerance, protect data integrity, plan a rollback you can actually execute, and validate the result — in a regulated, always-on environment.