Marco Gerber | Microsoft Azure & Foundry MVP

I’m beyond honored that my project "Hear the World using Azure OpenAI and a Raspberry Pi" was featured in the official @raspberrypi.com magazine! 🎉 If you're interested, feel free to grab a physical copy or the free PDF edition from the Raspberry Pi website: magazine.raspberrypi.com/issues/159

👻 What you see isn't always what your AI sees. I briefly talked about ASCII smuggling at last year's Swiss Microsoft Security Summit. Since then, I've noticed this topic rarely comes up, so I decided to dig deeper and share what I learned. 👉 marcogerber.ch/ascii-smuggl...

What if Bicep could do more than deploy to Azure? 🦾 With Bicep Local Deploy, you can extend Bicep much like Terraform providers - from automating deployments to managing on-prem or SaaS. Learn more about how to use it, and what’s happening behind the scenes. 🔗

Coming: External Key Management to extend Azure Managed HSM 🔐 Bring your own keys from on-prem or trusted 3rd-party HSMs, no longer limited to Azure Key Vault/Managed HSM. This will affect SLAs, since customers are responsible for their HSM and keys. blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/06...

Upload blocked by DLP - until it saw my new Information Security Administrator Associate certificate 🎉 learn.microsoft.com/api/credenti...

Azure Bastion integration with AKS is now in public preview. Use Azure CLI to open a tunnel to a private AKS cluster, which uses the Bastion host in the background. AKS clusters with public FQDN disabled aren't currently supported. learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/...

RIP then 🥲

I encountered a new error during Bicep deployments that worked fine until recently: ❗The content for this response was already consumed❗ Looks like it started with Azure CLI 2.73.0 - errors don’t show properly. Read more details and solutions in my latest blog post: marcogerber.ch/the-content-...

Looks like there is an issue in the Azure portal where resources cannot be found. Related actions are failing as a result. I've observed this behavior across multiple tenants.

I've built a simple Streamlit chat app using the Azure AI Inference client for quick model testing, PoC's, and demos. 🧩 Features: - Text & image input - Model switcher - System prompt presets - Session-based chat history - Console logging for debugging Check it out: marcogerber.ch/streamlit-ch...

Very interesting article: Prompt injection attacks on vision language models in oncology www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Defender for AI Services is now GA and available for all subscriptions! 🛡️ Learn more about its capabilities: marcogerber.ch/defender-for...

Public Preview: Azure virtual network terminal access point (TAP). Virtual network TAP (agentless) leverages Azure’s native infrastructure to mirror traffic with minimal overhead and zero performance impact on VMs. azure.microsoft.com/en-us/update...

Finally! Easy service upgrade and change service tier in Azure AI Search (Public Preview). Azure AI Search now lets you easily change service tiers between Basic, S1, S2, and S3 tiers or upgrade for more capacity and features - no rebuild or reindexing needed. azure.microsoft.com/en-us/update...

Public Preview: Remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) support in Azure Functions. Azure Functions now supports an early preview of triggers and bindings for building tools with remote MCP and server-sent events (SSE). azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/update...

Today's learning 💡 Private Endpoints generate a /32 default route that automatically propagates within their vnet and peered vnets. In hub-spoke architectures, this can inadvertently bypass firewalls or an NVA. To mitigate this, take a look at 'Network Policies for Private Endpoints'.

Using 'extends' in Azure Bicep forces all parameters from the root file to be inherited and used. I suggested making this optional in a GitHub Issue - give it a thumbs up or +1 if you’d find that useful!👍 github.com/Azure/bicep/...

Copilot in Azure is now generally available, with all current capabilities remaining free of charge. techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurein...

Maintainers: Did you know you could spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time coding? 💡 Maintainership will never be the same once you start using these GitHub Actions. ⬇️ github.blog/open-source/...

A new Computer-Using Agent (CUA) is coming to the Azure AI Foundry. This allows you to automate UI driven workflows, like autonomous UI navigation. I wonder how this works in real life and whether this is the right approach for sustainable automation. azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/a...

Arrived in Seattle after a great flight right over Greenland, what a view! Ready for my first MVP Summit, can‘t wait to meet everybody 👋🏻 😃 #MVPBuzz #MVPSummit @alschneiter.bsky.social

Retirement: Kubenet Networking for Azure Kubernetes Service to Be Retired on March 31, 2028. Upgrade to CNI overlay in time. azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/update...

Export as Bicep is fully available today! 💪 Test it out yourself in the portal, instructions can be found here: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/...

New blog post 📢 Learn more about Dev Containers and how to quickly spin up containerized, reproducible development environments, including a cheat sheet to get you started. Check it out: marcogerber.ch/dev-c...

You can now use the Vision input in VS Code and Visual Studio in public preview. github.blog/changelog/20...

The Swiss MVP Gettogether was a lot of fun, playing Ping Pong all night long 🏓 See you next time! #MVPBuzz

Did you know you can generate dynamic diagrams directly inside a markdown file in GitHub? docs.github.com/en/get-start...

You can now enable a new GPT-4o Copilot model for code completion. The new GPT-4o mini based model, with additional training on over 275,000 high-quality public repositories across 30+ popular programming languages, offers enhanced accuracy and performance. github.blog/changelog/20...

GitHub Copilot custom instructions is now GA! Update your Visual Studio Code (v1.98) to have this out of experimental. I have updated my blog post on this: johnlokerse.dev/2024/11/11/i... #github #githubcopilot

New public IP address ranges have been added for Azure DevOps. devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/updat...

Introducing GitHub Copilot agent mode (preview): the next evolution in AI-assisted coding. Copilot in agent mode is capable of running terminal commands, iterating on its own code to fix errors, and so much more. Available in VS Code Insiders now. Learn more: code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/0...

Best money spent in a long time ☕️

Data store decision tree: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/...

A new AI workloads protection plan is coming to Defender for Cloud! 🛡️ It generates alerts for threats like jailbreaks, data poisoning, leakage, and credential theft for models on Azure OpenAI and model inference. Learn more (jailbreak demo included): marcogerber.ch/defender-for...

Azure SQL Database now has a free tier including 10 serverless databases with an allocation of 100,000 vCore seconds of compute, 32 GB of data storage, and 32 GB of backup storage every month. Great for testing or smaller projects without spending a ton! techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azuresq...

Have you ever wondered what alerts Defender for Cloud actually covers? Here's a reference list that shows the alerts for each protection plan: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/...

AI workload protection is in public preview in Defender for Cloud, noice! 🛡️🤖

Bicep community call wrap-up: The latest update adds the fail() function for custom errors, "Export as Bicep" returning to Azure Portal (ETA: March), and Bicep is coming to Copilot in Azure (Preview) for template generation. Plus, version pinning for Bicep files. 💪

I got quota errors on a new Azure OpenAI deployment. In AI Foundry, the quota seemed used but without specific resources, like in Switzerland North. The issue? Deleted OpenAI services still hold capacity. Solution: Purge deleted instances in the Azure portal, and the capacity is released. 🗑️

Had a great time at Microsoft’s executive roundtable yesterday, discussing security & AI! Really interesting to see how Ontinue runs its advanced SOC services. Loved sharing thoughts on securing Azure workloads in the age of AI. Thanks @microsoft.com , Ontinue & Holinger! 🛡️

AI agents are currently a hot topic. Agents are more of a concept than concrete products or services. Learn more about the "agentic" approach up to multi-agent orchestration architectures that can autonomously find solutions and complete tasks. 🤖 Blog post: marcogerber.ch/the-c...

Interesting to see such new approaches. MatterGen is a GenAI tool for discovering new materials. Instead of testing individual materials according to the requirements, MatterGen finds or creates materials based on the materialistic requirements. www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

Have you ever wondered what the Microsoft Container Registry contains? Here's the list of images: mcr.microsoft.com/v2/_catalog

GitHub Copilot in VS Code cheat sheet 💡 code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot...

Does anyone know a way to strictly enforce MFA or reauthentication on #PIM role activations? I know you can use Authentication Contexts, but since an access token is created for the MS-PIM app including the MFA claim, this only works for the first activation in a session. #ConditionalAccess #EntraID

Merry Christmas everyone! 🎄 Code: github.com/gerbermarco/...