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DevOps agent

Agentic DevOps: Microsoft Azure and GitHub Copilot for software development

Agentic DevOps: Microsoft's Next Software Development Trend at Build 2025

Microsoft launched Agentic DevOps, a new technique that leverages intelligent agents to rethink application creation and maintenance, marking a major milestone in the software development lifecycle. Agentic DevOps, the “next evolution of DevOps,” envisions AI agents working with developers and each other to automate and optimise the software lifecycle.

As it celebrates its 51st anniversary, the company is reimagining its founding as a “software factory” developed by developers for developers. The idea is to help engineers “break free from the grind,” restoring the “joy, your flow, and the magic of building” lost in rising demands, complexity, and technological debt. Besides coding, developers spend a lot of time designing systems, going through documentation, troubleshooting, refactoring, and fighting legacy code.

Agentic workflows are offered by GitHub Copilot, which is crucial to this shift. GitHub Copilot, already used by 15 million developers to speed up development, is expanding beyond code completion to enable agentic workflows, which help teams move from idea to production faster, improve code quality, collaborate faster, fortify security, pay off technical debt, and maintain app smoothness.

Microsoft is making GitHub Copilot available to all Visual Studio Code users to promote openness and community-driven innovation.

The Agentic DevOps announcement includes new developer-focused agents. A new coding agent elevates GitHub Copilot from pair programming to “peer” status in the development team. This agent can manage complex, multi-step coding jobs with other agents. Developers may assign it code reviews, test authoring, issue solutions, and full specification implementation.

It works across files and recommends terminal commands from a single prompt. Popular code editors including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, Eclipse, and Xcode offer “Agent mode”. Due to its audit logs and branch controls, this agent's suggested changes must be evaluated before deployment.

New Azure Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Agents go beyond development. A 24/7 production system monitor spares developers of late-night warnings. It automatically diagnoses and fixes problems. The SRE Agent evaluates application health and performance in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure App Service, serverless, and databases using Microsoft's worldwide experience.

It can solve problems itself or guide developers through root cause analysis. Note that repair items and remedial activities are documented as GitHub issues for team follow-up. Resilient, self-healing technologies allow teams to relax and focus, recover faster, and have fewer wake-up calls.

Agentic DevOps aims to address technical debt. With mainframe modernisation imminent, GitHub Copilot is offering new app modernisation services to help developers update stacks, focussing on legacy Java and.NET workloads. These features enable code assessments, dependency updates, and remediation by providing visibility and control over changes and automatically building and executing update plans. The goal is to produce cost-effective, safe, and stable apps so developers can focus on innovation rather than the past.

Azure's platform supports these capabilities with AI + machine learning services like Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, containers (Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure App Service), databases (Azure Cosmos DB, Azure DB for PostgreSQL), and monitoring (Azure Monitor). Azure AI Foundry is a “AI App and agent factory” that lets you test cutting-edge models from several providers in the GitHub workflow with a new native integration. This integration lets GitHub Actions users invoke, compare, and exchange models via a single API.

Microsoft calls Agentic DevOps “as transformative as the shift to the cloud” and “seismic shift.” It promises to minimise friction, simplify processes, and rewrite decades-old cost structures that hampered teams. Agentic DevOps automates monotonous tasks to free developers to create the future and enhance productivity.