amid the flood of other #msIgnite announcements, the new Azure Copilot agents are for the IT folks Ignite is aimed at: to help automate migration, deployment, optimization (call it FinOps), observability, resiliency and troubleshooting by proactively spotting issues and offering to fix them

it's a mistake to think cloud is about saving money: it's about getting infrastructure with better security, performance, maintenance and scale than you can afford to build and run yourself but you only save money if you choose the most efficient option. Finally, Azure will help you a bit with that

ditto all the other bits of cloud that Microsoft knows more about configuring than customers who don't have the time to wade through a thousand resource types and 100s of pages of really thorough docs: agents can look at your workload and tells you if you could do ingress or zone availability better

if you're watching the Ignite keynote, Azure Copilot was the agent they used to work out that they had forgotten to turn on the thing that connects their backend to their ecommerce site: you can see it tell you what the problem is, track down the root cause and offer a fix you can ask it to apply