Question 1

Is the Azure Foundry Academy completely free?

Accepted Answer

Yes, 100% free. No sign-up, no credit card. All 12 modules, 48 lessons, and 100+ quiz questions are accessible immediately. Your progress saves locally in your browser.

Question 2

What is Microsoft Foundry (Azure AI Foundry)?

Accepted Answer

Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry, and before that Azure AI Studio) is a unified platform-as-a-service for building, deploying, and managing AI applications and agents at scale. It consolidates models, tools, evaluation, safety, and governance into a single enterprise-ready environment.

Question 3

What topics does the Azure Foundry Academy cover?

Accepted Answer

The course covers platform fundamentals, model catalog & deployment, Foundry Tools (Vision, Speech, Document Intelligence), the Foundry SDK, AI Agent Service, RAG with Azure AI Search, fine-tuning, evaluation & safety, observability, enterprise architecture & security, orchestration frameworks (Semantic Kernel, LangChain), and certification preparation.

Question 4

What certifications cover Azure AI Foundry?

Accepted Answer

Key certifications include AI-103: Developing AI Apps and Agents on Azure (Associate level) and AI-901: Azure AI Fundamentals. Both validate skills in building and deploying AI solutions using Azure AI Foundry.

Question 5

Do I need any prerequisites?

Accepted Answer

Basic cloud computing knowledge is helpful but not required. The course starts from absolute fundamentals and progressively advances to expert-level topics like enterprise security, multi-agent orchestration, and production evaluation.

Question 6

Does the Azure Foundry Academy include hands-on labs?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Hands-on terminal labs are built into the lessons - provision an Azure AI Foundry resource and deploy a model entirely from the Azure CLI using real, vendor-verified commands, with objectives, hints, solutions, and XP rewards. No Azure subscription or sign-up needed.

Feature	Details
Linux ARM64 Support	Run Foundry Local on ARM64-based Linux devices (Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA Jetson, etc.)
Live Audio Transcription	Real-time speech-to-text processing directly on-device
Text Embeddings	Generate vector embeddings locally for offline RAG pipelines
Qwen 3.5 Vision Support	Run Qwen 3.5 Vision model locally for on-device multimodal inference
ONNX Runtime 1.26	Latest ONNX Runtime for optimized model execution across hardware

Foundry Local v1.1–1.2

Run AI Models Locally

What's New in Foundry Local v1.1–1.2

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