How does Azure AI Foundry work

  • 5 minutes

An AI hub provides a collaborative workspace for AI solution development and management. You need at least one Azure AI hub to use the solution development features and capabilities of AI Foundry.

Screenshot of an AI hub in Azure AI Foundry portal.

An Azure AI hub can host one or more projects. Each project encapsulates the tools and assets used to create a specific AI solution.

For example, you might create a project to enable data scientists and developers to collaborate on building a custom copilot for a business application or process.

Screenshot of a project in Azure AI Foundry portal.

What can I do with an Azure AI hub?

An Azure AI hub is the foundation for AI development projects on Azure, and enables you to define shared assets that can be used across multiple projects. You can use the AI Foundry portal and Azure portal to perform the following tasks in an Azure AI hub on the Manage page:

  • Create members and assign them to specific roles.
  • Create and manage compute instances on which to run experiments, prompt flows, and custom code.
  • Create and manage connections to resources, such as data stores, GitHub, Azure AI Search indexes, and others.
  • Define policies to manage behavior, such as automatic compute shutdown.

What can I do with a project?

All AI development in the Azure AI Foundry portal is performed within a project. You use a project to:

  • Deploy language models to support a chatbot or copilot.
  • Test models in the chat playground.
  • Add your own data to augment prompts.
  • Use prompt flow to define flows that combine models, prompts, and custom code.
  • Evaluate model responses to prompts.
  • Manage indexes and datasets for custom data.
  • Define content filters to mitigate potentially harmful responses.
  • Use Visual Studio Code in your browser to create custom code.
  • Deploy solutions as web apps and containerized services.

Associated Azure resources

You can use Azure AI Foundry to create an Azure AI hub in the Management center, or you can create one during the process of creating a new project. When you do so, an AI hub resource is created in your Azure subscription in the resource group you specify. This resource provides a collaborative workspace for AI development.

In addition to the core AI hub resource, other Azure resources are created to provide supporting services, like:

  • A Storage account in which the data for your AI projects is stored securely.
  • A Key vault in which credentials used to access external resources and other sensitive values are secured.
  • A Container registry to store Docker images used by your AI solutions.
  • An Application insights resource to record usage and performance metrics.
  • An Azure OpenAI Service resource that provides generative AI models for your applications.

All of Azure AI

Azure AI Foundry provides an integration point for other AI Services, such as Speech, Language, and Vision. By adding other AI Services to your solution, you can add even more capabilities to your AI solution.