Azure: End of Year Roundup

It’s that time of year again — the final UK Azure User Group event of 2025! Join us for an evening of cloud-flavoured nostalgia, learning, and laughs as Richard Conway, one of the original founders of the group, takes the stage to break down the biggest moments in Azure this year.
From the headline announcements at Microsoft Build and Ignite, to the unexpected (and occasionally hilarious) mishaps that only the cloud could provide, Richard will walk through how 2025 has shaped the Microsoft ecosystem — and what it all means for the year ahead.

Expect a no-fluff, insight-packed session covering the real-world impact of Azure’s evolving services, where adoption has soared, and which features have truly changed the game for developers, architects, and businesses alike.

If you’ve lost track of the dozens of releases and updates that have landed this year (and who hasn’t?), this is your chance to catch up — all in one relaxed, community-powered evening. Come for the knowledge, stay for the beer, pizza, and banter.

We’ll dive into some of the standout feature releases that defined 2025:

• At Build 2025, Microsoft announced the expansion of Azure AI Foundry, adding hundreds of new models (including the recent integration of xAI’s Grok 3 into Azure) and turning AI agents into first-class citizens in the cloud.
• Another highlight: the debut of the Azure SRE Agent, which embeds agentic AI into GitHub Copilot and Azure infrastructure to autonomously monitor and respond to system incidents.
• In the infrastructure space, Azure rolled out major improvements such as private-network GPU support for Azure Container Apps and enhanced failover performance in Azure Database for MySQL, giving developers new ways to modernise their workloads.
• On the adoption front, we’ll examine how organisations across the UK have surged ahead with agent-based automation, large-scale migrations to Azure’s new database tiers, and edge-AI deployments that are rewriting how cloud architecture gets done.

Join us to explore not just what was released, but why it matters — what worked, what didn’t, and what you should be planning for in 2026.