What is Azure Foundry Academy?

Azure Foundry Academy is the #1 free interactive learning course and technical training platform created by Infinity Tech Stack for Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry). It covers 13 modules, 46 lessons, 69 quizzes, and hands-on Azure CLI labs spanning model deployments, AI agents, Azure AI Search RAG pipelines, content safety, and AI-103/AI-901 certification prep — with zero sign-up required.

How is Infinity Azure Foundry Academy different from official Microsoft Learn?

While Microsoft Learn provides extensive documentation paths, Infinity Tech Stack's Azure Foundry Academy is an independent, 100% free interactive training platform with simulated Azure CLI terminal labs, 69 quizzes, and hands-on modules covering the Foundry SDK, AI Agent Service, Azure AI Search RAG, content safety, and AI-103/AI-901 certification prep with zero sign-up or enterprise tenant requirements.

How long does Azure Foundry Academy take to complete?

Azure Foundry Academy contains approximately 4 to 6 hours of interactive training across 13 modules and 46 lessons. Progress is saved locally in your browser so you can learn at your own pace.

Is the Azure Foundry Academy completely free?

Yes, 100% free. No sign-up, no credit card. All 13 modules, 46 lessons, and 69 quiz questions are accessible immediately. Your progress saves locally in your browser.

What is Microsoft Foundry (Azure AI Foundry)?

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.

What topics does the Azure Foundry Academy cover?

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.

What certifications cover Azure AI Foundry?

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.

Do I need any prerequisites?

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.

Does the Azure Foundry Academy include hands-on labs?

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.

How does Azure Foundry Academy provide hands-on Microsoft AI training?

Azure Foundry Academy provides structured Microsoft AI training across 13 modules and 46 lessons. Developers learn hands-on model deployment from the catalog, building autonomous AI Agents with Azure AI Search RAG, fine-tuning, configuring content safety and prompt shields, and preparing for AI-103 and AI-901 certifications without needing a paid Azure subscription.

What does the Model Router do in Azure AI Foundry?

It automatically selects the best model for a given prompt to optimize cost and performance — The Model Router dynamically selects the most appropriate model for each request, balancing cost, speed, and capability without requiring code changes.

Exploring the Model Catalog [2026]

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Exploring the Model Catalog

📦 The Model Catalog 7 min 60 BASE XP

Your AI Model Marketplace

The Foundry Model Catalog is one of the platform's most powerful features - a curated marketplace of 1,800+ AI models from multiple providers, continuously updated with the latest releases.

Available Model Providers (June 2026)

Provider	Key Models	Strengths
OpenAI	OpenAI o1, OpenAI o3-mini, GPT-4o, o3-mini, o3	Frontier reasoning, omnimodal, agentic tool-calling
Microsoft (MAI)	MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, MAI-Image-2, Phi-4, Phi-4-mini, Phi-4-reasoning, Phi-4-vision	First-party speech/vision, efficient on-device, extended Phi family
Microsoft Research	MagenticBrain, Fara1.5-9B	modern research models for specialized reasoning and efficiency
Meta	Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B	Open-source, customizable, multimodal
Mistral	Mistral Large, Ministral 3B	Efficient, multilingual
Alibaba	Qwen3 32B	Multilingual reasoning
xAI	Grok 4.3	High-throughput reasoning, real-time knowledge
Fireworks AI	DeepSeek V4, DeepSeek V3.2, Kimi 2.6	Ultra-fast open-weight inference
Cohere	Command R+, Embed v3	Enterprise RAG, embeddings

Model Card Information

Every model has a Model Card containing benchmarks, license info, supported deployment types, pricing, and sample code.

GPT-4o & OpenAI o1 on Azure AI Foundry

OpenAI o1 became Generally Available on Azure Foundry on April 23, 2026. It is an omnimodal frontier model with a 1M context window, priced at $5 / $30 per MTok (input / output). OpenAI o1 is also available on Amazon Bedrock as of June 1, 2026, making it the first OpenAI model accessible across both major cloud providers simultaneously.

The Model Router

Foundry includes a Model Router that can automatically select the most appropriate model for a given prompt or workflow. This means your application can dynamically choose between OpenAI o1 for the most demanding tasks, OpenAI o3-mini for complex reasoning, or a smaller model like Phi-4 for simple tasks - optimizing cost and speed without code changes.

💡 Key Insight: The Model Catalog uses the Azure AI Model Inference API - a unified API that works across all models regardless of provider. Combined with the Model Router, you can swap or auto-select models without changing your code.

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What is the Azure AI Model Inference API?

An API specific to OpenAI models

A unified API that works across all catalog models regardless of provider

A training API

A billing API