Azure Weekly Update - 20th February 2026

Azure update is up!

https://youtu.be/4EVWtkjKTkI

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azure-weekly-update-20th-february-2026-john-savill-rhopc/

• Prem SSDv2 and Ultra instance snapshot access (00:53) - Snapshots capture a point-in-time view of managed disks which can then be used to create new instances or quickly recover, for example I can take before applying major change like app/OS upgrade or setup test environments based on production. Instant access is exactly as the name implies and enables use and access to snapshots as soon as they are created and restored disks instantly as any data hydration happens transparently in the background and with no performance impact.
• AKS auto-provision encryption-at-host and LocalDNS (02:06) - Node auto-provisioning clusters leverages Karpenter to auto scale nodes using the most appropriate node type which then optimizes your costs. Encryption-at-host provides encryption of temporary storage, any cache and end-to-end host to storage encryption. This is now supported for auto-provision clusters providing that extra security. Additionally LocalDNS is also supported which provides a local host DNS cache and forwarding capability which reduces latency and adds a layer of resiliency for any DNS transient issues.
• Node autoprovision in gov and private cloud (03:36) - Node auto-provisioning is also now available in Azure gov and private clouds.
• AKS MCP Server (03:49) - MCP Servers provide knowledge and tools to AI agents but also reflects capabilities in a way the AI agent can natively understand. With the AKS MCP server available on GitHub you can now enable any AI Agent to work with AKS including CRUD AKS resource operations, retrieve details on clusters and even manage multi-cluster scenarios with fleet support.
• AKS agentic CLI (04:47) - az aks agent exposes an entire group of natural language interactions about your AKS. This can run as either a local docker container on your machine or as a pod on your AKS cluster. Begin with general questions, like "What's wrong with my cluster?" Let the AI guide you to specific issues.
• Azure Functions Flex Consumption tools (05:22) - Azure Functions Flex Consumption is a Linux-based offering that provides serverless billing BUT has capabilities such as private networking, instance memory size selection, always ready instances and fast/large scale-out. There are now new tools both to troubleshoot quota and related constraints in addition to troubleshooting other types of deployment and configuration issues.
• Azure Functions .NET 10 support (06:02) - Azure Functions now has .NET 10 support using the isolated worked model for Linux and Windows. Isolated uses a separate worker process from the host runtime giving greater flexibility (including .NET version and reducing conflicts.
• Claude Sonnet 4.6 availability (06:34) - The latest medium tier model from Anthropic is now available across many Microsoft solutions including Foundry, GitHub Copilot, Azure Databricks AI Model Serving. It has a 1 million context window and a 128K output. This enables it to work on large bodies of work, code bases and puts it in the ability to provide operational capabilities including multi-turn. It can adaptively decide if reasoning is required. It’s also a big upgrade on previous versions for computer use.
• Agent Monitoring Dashboard (07:58) - This is part of Microsoft Foundry but I think its way more powerful than first glance. It provides both operational and evaluation results for agents which are critical to actual understanding if your agent is really performing. Token usage (spot inefficiencies), Latency (detect slow or complex runs), Run success rate (measure reliability), evaluation metrics (ensuring staying fit for purpose, not regressing so its quality over time), red teaming results (its secure and would surface any safety risks) are all critical and available in the dashboard.