The Azure MCP Server
One early implementation of MCP on the Microsoft’s platform is the open source Azure MCP Server, which recently entered public preview. This provides a common broker for AI access to key Azure services. Like many recent Azure projects, this is open source, with code available on GitHub. It offers access to much of the Azure platform, including databases, storage, and services like the Azure CLI.
Support for the Azure CLI (and the Developer CLI) is interesting as it allows your MCP-powered agents to use Azure directly, treating MCP calls as an operator. This lets you build agents that provide a natural language self-service interface to Azure, for example, taking a description of an infrastructure and then building the Arm templates needed to deploy it. You can even imagine a multimodel agent that analyzes a picture of a whiteboard sketch, creates a description of the resources needed to implement the sketch, and then deploys it so you’re ready to build code. Other system administration services available through the Azure MCP Server include listing current resource groups and using KQL to query Azure Monitoring logs.
Using Azure MCP server with GitHub Copilot Chat
As it’s based on MCP, this new server works from any AI tool that supports MCP, for example, the GitHub Copilot Agent Mode. Simply add the server to your tenant and start asking questions via Copilot, either directly or with the Visual Studio Code integration. In practice, this last option is an effective way to learn how to use MCP and to build the prompts in your own MCP-based AI applications.
