A Visual Guide to Building Agentic AI Solutions on Microsoft Azure
The cognitive core for reasoning and planning, powered by Azure OpenAI Service.
The central nervous system directing the agent's workflow and coordinating components.
The agent's 'hands,' enabling interaction with external systems via tools.
The underlying infrastructure hosting the agent's components, from serverless to Kubernetes.
Maintains state and context for learning and continuity using services like Cosmos DB.
Governs the agent's lifecycle, from development and evaluation to deployment.
The most critical architectural decision is how to orchestrate your agent. Azure offers two distinct philosophies: one centered on integrating with business processes, and one centered on building the agent itself as a first-class entity.
"Make my business process intelligent."
"Build an intelligent, governable agent."
Choosing where to host your agent's tools and components involves a trade-off between simplicity and control. This chart compares the primary Azure compute options across key dimensions.
Automating an invoice exception process using event-driven, low-code components.
Trigger
Azure Service Bus
Orchestrator
Azure Logic App
Reasoning & Action
Azure OpenAI + Connectors
A team of specialized agents collaborating on a complex research task.
Orchestrator
Azure AI Foundry
Specialized Agents
Azure Container Apps / AKS
Shared Memory
Azure Cosmos DB
A secure helpdesk chatbot answering questions from a private knowledge base.
User Interface
Azure App Service
Agentic Retrieval
AI Foundry + AI Search
Security & Memory
VNet + Cosmos DB
Use Logic Apps and Functions for prototypes to minimize overhead and iterate quickly.
Migrate to AI Foundry for mature, enterprise-wide applications that require robust governance.
Implement a defense-in-depth security posture and use Azure ML for continuous evaluation.