Microsoft Foundry

  • 5 minutes

Microsoft Foundry is a platform for AI development on Microsoft Azure. While you can provision individual Foundry Tools resources and build applications that consume them without it, the project organization, resource management, and AI development capabilities of Microsoft Foundry makes it the recommended way to build all but the most simple solutions.

Microsoft Foundry provides the Microsoft Foundry portal, a web-based visual interface for working with AI projects. It also provides the Microsoft Foundry SDK, which you can use to build AI solutions programmatically.

Microsoft Foundry projects

In Microsoft Foundry, you manage the resource connections, data, code, and other elements of the AI solution in projects. There are two kinds of project:

Foundry projects

Diagram of a Foundry project.

Foundry projects are associated with a Microsoft Foundry resource in an Azure subscription. Foundry projects provide support for Microsoft Foundry Models (including OpenAI models), Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, Foundry Tools, and tools for evaluation and responsible AI development.

A Microsoft Foundry resource supports the most common AI development tasks to develop generative AI chat apps and agents. In most cases, using a Foundry project provides the right level of resource centralization and capabilities with a minimal amount of administrative resource management. You can use Microsoft Foundry portal to work in projects that are based in Microsoft Foundry resources, making it easy to add connected resources and manage model and agent deployments.

Hub-based projects

Diagram of a hub-based project.

Hub-based projects are associated with an Azure AI hub resource in an Azure subscription. Hub-based projects include a Microsoft Foundry resource, as well as managed compute, support for Prompt Flow development, and connected Azure storage and Azure key vault resources for secure data storage.

Azure AI hub resources support advanced AI development scenarios, like developing Prompt Flow based applications or fine-tuning models. You can also use Azure AI hub resources in both Microsoft Foundry portal and Azure Machine learning portal, making it easier to work on collaborative projects that involve data scientists and machine learning specialists as well as developers and AI software engineers

Tip

For more information about Microsoft Foundry project types, see What is Microsoft Foundry?.