Today, I am pleased to announce that Azure Local now scales to support deployments of up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign environment, allowing organizations to run much larger workloads locally across large-footprint datacenters, industrial environments and edge locations while maintaining control within their sovereign boundary.

Organizations operating national infrastructure, regulated workloads or mission-critical services are navigating a fundamental shift in how cloud infrastructure must be deployed and managed. As digital sovereignty postures evolve and regulatory requirements tighten across regions, infrastructure strategies are increasingly shaped by the need to maintain jurisdictional control over data, operations and dependencies. At the same time, AI and data-intensive applications are moving closer to where data is generated, requiring infrastructure that can scale to support larger deployment footprints while maintaining operational control, compliance and data residency requirements within sovereign environments.

Azure Local is the foundation for Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud, allowing organizations to run cloud-consistent infrastructure on hardware they own and operate within their sovereign boundary. It supports deployments across connected, intermittently connected or fully disconnected environments. With Azure Local disconnected operations, customers retain the ability to apply policy enforcement, role-based access control, auditing and compliance configuration locally, allowing them control over how infrastructure is configured, secured and updated regardless of public cloud connectivity.

Scaling Sovereign Private Cloud

Sovereign Private Cloud deployments must scale to support not only larger workloads, but also the operational requirements of national infrastructure and regulated industries. Azure Local allows organizations to grow deployments from hundreds up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign boundary, allowing infrastructure to expand alongside demand without requiring architectural redesign.

As deployment footprints grow, resiliency becomes essential to maintaining continuous operations for mission critical services. Expanded fault domains and infrastructure pools help prevent hardware failures from resulting in service outages, ensuring critical workloads remain operational across environments with varying levels of cloud connectivity.

At these larger scale points, organizations can run data-intensive AI inference and analytics workloads entirely within their own environment. With support for high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure, sensitive models and operational data remain within customer-controlled infrastructure, while access management, auditing and compliance controls are maintained within the sovereign deployment.

Built for challenging workloads 

Increased deployment scale unlocks new workload placement opportunities, from large sovereign private cloud deployments to distributed AI workloads, allowing organizations to run more data intensive and latency sensitive applications entirely within their sovereign boundary.

AT&T, one of the world’s largest telecommunications operators, is deploying Azure Local to run mission-critical infrastructure on hardware they own in their environment. The goal: full operational control while running at the scale the business demands.

“Azure Local provides the infrastructure foundation we need to run critical operations at scale, while ensuring control and governance across our environment. The consistency of the Azure operating model, delivered on our own infrastructure, is key as we continue to modernize while delivering reliable services to our customers.”

— Sherry McCaughan, Vice President – Mobility Core Services, AT&T

Kadaster, the Netherlands’ official land registry and mapping agency, is running Azure Local to keep sovereign control over some of the country’s most sensitive public data.

“As a government agency responsible for some of the Netherlands’ most sensitive data, we need infrastructure that gives us full control over where our data lives and how it’s governed. Azure Local has been a consistent foundation for that — and as our workloads grow in scale and complexity, the platform has grown with us.”

— Maarten van der Tol, General Manager, Kadaster

FiberCop, Italy’s most advanced and extensive digital network operator is deploying Azure Local across its edge locations to bring sovereign cloud and AI services to organizations throughout the country. Fabio Veronese, Chief Information & Technology Officer commented:

“FiberCop is better positioned than any other player on the Italian market to drive innovation and deliver cloud as well as AI services at national scale. Azure Local supports our mission to drive Italy’s digital future and brings Microsoft’s cloud capabilities to edge workloads across the country while keeping data sovereignty and compliance where they matter most.”

The infrastructure behind Sovereign Private Cloud

Azure Local is available today with validated compute and enterprise storage platforms from partners including DataON, Dell Technologies, Everpure, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Lenovo and NetApp, allowing organizations to integrate existing Storage Area Networks (SAN) and preserve prior investments while allowing compute and storage resources to scale independently within their sovereign environment.

At the silicon level, Intel®  Xeon® 6 processors provide the compute foundation for the platform. Built for the density and performance demands of modern enterprise workloads, Xeon 6 also brings built-in AI acceleration with Intel® AMX, meaning organizations running inference or generative AI workloads within their sovereign environment do not need to introduce separate, specialized infrastructure to do so.

Together, Azure Local, validated compute and enterprise storage platforms, accelerated computing platforms and underlying silicon can provide a datacenter-scale stack that supports sovereign infrastructure deployments while helping ensure data, models and execution remain within customer-controlled environments.

Sovereign infrastructure built for your requirements

Azure Local was built to meet customers where their requirements are whether that means strict data residency, disconnected operations, regulated workloads or AI running close to where data is generated. As these requirements evolve across regulated industries and governments worldwide, Sovereign Private Cloud deployments can expand from a single node at the edge to large enterprise-scale datacenter environments, running on hardware organizations own and operate, with consistent lifecycle management through Azure.

Resources:

• Learn more about Azure Local
• Explore Microsoft’s Sovereign Cloud
• Read the Tech Community blog
• Visit the Azure Local solution catalog

Douglas Phillips leads global engineering efforts for Microsoft’s specialized, sovereign and private clouds. He is responsible for Microsoft’s global strategy, products and operations that bring Microsoft’s industry-leading solutions, including Azure, our adaptive cloud portfolio and Microsoft 365 collaboration suite, to customers with additional sovereignty, security, edge and compliance requirements.

The post Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud scales to thousands of nodes with Azure Local appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

TL;DR: Today, we are announcing that all GitHub Copilot plans will transition to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026.

Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage. Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model.

This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users.

To help customers prepare, we are also launching a preview bill experience in early May, giving users and admins visibility into projected costs before the June 1 transition. This will be available to users via their Billing Overview page when they log in to github.com.

Why we’re making this change

Copilot is not the same product it was a year ago.

It has evolved from an in-editor assistant into an agentic platform capable of running long, multi-step coding sessions, using the latest models, and iterating across entire repositories. Agentic usage is becoming the default, and it brings significantly higher compute and inference demands.

Today, a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session can cost the user the same amount. GitHub has absorbed much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage, but the current premium request model is no longer sustainable.

Usage-based billing fixes that. It better aligns pricing with actual usage, helps us maintain long-term service reliability, and reduces the need to gate heavy users.

What’s changing

Starting June 1, premium request units (PRUs) will be replaced by GitHub AI Credits.

Credits will be consumed based on token usage, including input, output, and cached tokens, according to the published API rates for each model.

A few important details:

• Base plan pricing is not changing. Copilot Pro remains $10/month, Pro+ remains $39/month, Business remains $19/user/month, and Enterprise remains $39/user/month.
• Code completions and Next Edit suggestions remain included in all plans and do not consume AI Credits.
• Fallback experiences will no longer be available. Today, users who exhaust PRUs may fall back to a lower-cost model and continue working. Under the new model, usage will instead be governed by available credits and admin budget controls.
• Copilot code review will also consume GitHub Actions minutes, in addition to GitHub AI Credits. These minutes are billed at the same per-minute rates as other GitHub Actions workflows.

Last week, we also rolled out temporary changes to Copilot Individual plans, including Free, Pro, Pro+, and Student, and paused self-serve Copilot Business plan purchases. These were reliability and performance measures as we prepare for the broader transition to usage-based billing. We will loosen usage limits once usage-based billing is in effect.

What this means for individuals

Copilot Pro and Pro+ monthly subscriptions will include monthly AI Credits aligned to their current subscription prices:

• Copilot Pro: $10/month, including $10 in monthly AI Credits
• Copilot Pro+: $39/month, including $39 in monthly AI Credits

Users on a monthly Pro or Pro+ plan will automatically migrate to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026.

Users on annual Pro or Pro+ plans will remain on their existing plan with premium request-based pricing until their plan expires. Model multipliers will increase on June 1 (see table) for annual plan subscribers only. At expiration, they will transition to Copilot Free with the option to upgrade to a paid monthly plan. Alternatively, they may convert to a monthly paid plan before their annual plan expires, and we will provide prorated credits for the remaining value of their annual plan.

What this means for businesses and enterprises

Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise monthly seat pricing remains unchanged:

• Copilot Business: $19/user/month, including $19 in monthly AI Credits
• Copilot Enterprise: $39/user/month, including $39 in monthly AI Credits

To support the transition, existing Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers will automatically receive promotional included usage for June, July, and August:

• Copilot Business: $30 in monthly AI Credits
• Copilot Enterprise: $70 in monthly AI Credits

We are also introducing pooled included usage across a business, which helps eliminate stranded capacity. Instead of each user’s unused included usage being isolated, credits can be pooled across the organization.

Admins will also have new budget controls. They will be able to set budgets at the enterprise, cost center, and user levels. When the included pool is exhausted, organizations can choose whether to allow additional usage at published rates or cap spend.

The bottom line

Plan prices aren’t changing. You’ll have full control over what you spend, tools to track your usage, and the option to purchase more AI Credits if and when you need them.

If you have questions, visit our documentation for individuals and for businesses and enterprises, and our FAQ and related discussion.

The post GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing appeared first on The GitHub Blog.

If you have been working in Microsoft 365 for any length of time, you have probably run into a situation where you needed users from one tenant to have access to resources in another. Maybe your organization acquired another company. Maybe you have a subsidiary that runs its own tenant. Maybe you are operating in both commercial and government cloud environments simultaneously. Whatever the reason, managing identities across tenant boundaries is one of those problems that sounds simple until you actually have to do it.

The traditional approach has been B2B guest invitations. You invite the user, they accept, and they show up in your directory as a guest. It works fine for a handful of people. At scale, though, it becomes a mess. Attributes drift. People leave the source organization, and their guest accounts linger. Display names go stale. Someone has to manually track all of it, and that someone is usually you.

Microsoft Entra Cross-Tenant Synchronization (CTS) is the automated solution to that problem. Instead of managing guest accounts by hand, you configure a provisioning engine to handle creation, updates, and removals automatically.

So What Is It?

Cross-Tenant Synchronization is a feature of Microsoft Entra ID that automatically provisions and manages users across two separate tenants. You have a source tenant where your users live, and a target tenant where you want those users to appear. CTS keeps the two in sync without you having to do anything manually once it is set up.

It is built on the same provisioning engine that Microsoft uses for automated user provisioning to SaaS applications. If you have ever configured app provisioning in Entra ID, the concepts will feel familiar. If you have not, do not worry about that yet. The important thing to understand right now is that this is not a one-time operation. It is an ongoing, automated relationship between two tenants.

What Can It Do?

The most obvious thing CTS does is create users in the target tenant based on what exists in the source. When you add someone to the sync configuration, they are automatically provisioned in the target. No invitation required, no manual steps, no waiting on end users to accept anything.

Beyond creation, it keeps user attributes up to date. Things like display names, job titles, departments, email addresses, and manager information stay consistent across both tenants as long as the sync is running. If something changes in the source, it flows through to the target on the next cycle.

It also handles deprovisioning. When a user leaves scope, either because they left the organization or because you removed them from the configuration, they get removed from the target tenant as well. That alone is a significant improvement over the traditional guest model, where stale accounts often stick around long after they should have been cleaned up.

Users appear in the target tenant as B2B collaboration users. By default, they are created as external members rather than external guests, which means they behave much more like internal users across Microsoft 365 workloads. They show up in Teams directories, they have broader access to SharePoint, and they generally run into fewer friction points day to day. You can configure them as guests if that suits your environment better, but member is the default for good reason.

What About Different Cloud Environments?

Standard CTS works within the same Microsoft cloud. Commercial to commercial, or GCC-High to GCC-High. But Microsoft also supports synchronization across different cloud environments, which opens things up considerably.

You can synchronize identities between a commercial tenant and an Azure Government tenant, or vice versa. You can also go between commercial and the 21Vianet cloud used in China. This matters a lot to organizations that operate across both commercial and government environments, which is more common than you might think, particularly in the defense and federal contracting space.

The configuration for cross-cloud synchronization follows the same general pattern as the same-cloud setup, with a few additional steps to establish trust across the cloud boundary. I will cover that in detail in a later article.

Why Does This Matter?

The short answer is that it removes a significant amount of manual work and replaces it with something reliable and consistent.

If you have been managing guest accounts across tenants by hand, you know how quickly it becomes a problem. Users change roles, and their guest profile in the other tenant still shows their old job title. Someone leaves, and their guest account sits there for months. A new person joins, and someone has to remember to send them an invitation, hope they accept it, and then manually verify that the attributes look right.

CTS takes all of that off your plate. Once it is configured, it runs on its own. Accounts get created when they should, updated when they should, and removed when they should. The tenants stay consistent without requiring ongoing manual effort to maintain that consistency.

It also benefits the users themselves. With automatic invitation redemption, they do not have to take any action to appear in the target tenant. Access just works. That is a much better experience than receiving an invitation email, clicking through a consent prompt, and hoping everything is set up correctly on the other side.

For organizations running multi-tenant environments, whether that is due to a merger, a regulatory requirement, or just the way things grew over time, CTS gives you a foundation for managing identities that actually scales.

Outlook used to be where you worked. Starting today, it's where Copilot works for you.

Until now, Copilot in Outlook helped with the task in front of you: drafting an email, catching up on a long thread, or finding a time to meet. Useful, but not the hardest part. The real work is everything around it: the follow-ups that slip, the messages that need attention, and the schedule changes that pile up before the day even starts.

That’s what’s changing today. Copilot in Outlook is now agentic, taking on the ongoing work of running your inbox and calendar. It triages emails, reschedules conflicts, and surfaces what matters most before you even ask.

Manage your inbox with Copilot

Managing your inbox isn’t just about reading and replying. It’s the steady work of keeping things moving. Copilot in Outlook now takes on that work, prioritizing emails, surfacing what needs a response, drafting follow-ups, and setting up rules to keep your inbox clutter-free.

You tell Copilot what you need, and it works through the steps, showing what it’s doing along the way so you can review, adjust, or step in whenever you choose.

Prompts to try:

• Help me with follow-ups: Identify people who haven’t replied to my emails after 24 hours, prioritize the ones that matter most, and draft polite follow-up emails for me.
• Draft complex emails: Pull the latest updates on [project name] over the last week. Draft a confidential, high‑importance update email for my manager.
• Stay on top of important emails: Create an inbox rule that assigns the “High Priority” category to all new emails from my manager where I’m on the “To:” line.
• Catch up after vacation: I just returned from vacation. Help me catch up: summarize what I’ve missed, highlight what’s most urgent, and draft a short briefing email. Then suggest emails I can safely archive and 1-2 tasks I should focus on first.

Availability: Available via the Frontier program for all Outlook endpoints beginning April 27.

Delegate calendar management to Copilot

Scheduling a meeting is the easy part. What comes after, reprioritizing, resolving conflicts, and finding time to prepare, is what really takes the effort.

Copilot in Outlook now does continuous work in your calendar. It keeps your schedule on track, handles routine changes, and helps you align your time to what matters most.   

Proactively monitor and manage your schedule

Based on your preferences, Copilot can proactively manage your calendar. It can respond to meeting invites, resolve 1:1 conflicts by rescheduling, rebook meeting rooms, and block focus time when you need it.

And when you need to make a change yourself, Copilot can help from chat or in the meeting form - rescheduling or canceling a meeting, updating details, or drafting an agenda based on the goal, audience, and tone you have in mind.

Prompts to try:

• Schedule a Copilot-managed 1:1 meeting: Schedule a weekly 1:1 with my manager for Monday afternoons. Reschedule when conflicts occur.
• Protect my time: Automatically follow all large meetings if they are outside my working hours, unless sent by my leadership team.
• Adjust my schedule: Reschedule all of my 1:1s with my direct reports for next week to the Friday afternoon that week.
• Draft an agenda: Create an agenda for tomorrow's product launch standup. Focus on open blockers, owner assignments, and a go/no-go decision.

Availability: Available via the Frontier program for Outlook for Windows and web beginning April 27.

Align your time to your priorities

It’s not always clear where your time goes at work. Copilot helps you step back and adjust your schedule around what matters most, so you can see your priorities, spot where you’re overbooked or context-switching, gather what you need to prepare, and protect focus time before important meetings.

Prompts to try: 

• Prioritize my time: Review my calendar next week and recommend which meetings I should decline, follow, delegate or convert to async in order to reduce meeting load while maintaining output quality.
• Prepare for meetings: Help me prepare for my meeting with [customer name] tomorrow. What do I need to know, what should I ask, and what risks should I watch for?

Availability: Available via the Frontier program for Outlook for Windows and web beginning April 27.

Get started

Copilot in Outlook now handles the work across your inbox and calendar. Join the Frontier program to get early access and help shape these new agentic experiences.