AI Signal 418
Microsoft Agent Framework Harness and Hosted Agents Reach General Availability
↗
Engineers can now deploy agents using a single binary that works locally, in containers, or on the hosted service without assembling their own orchestration loop. The harness supplies planning, history persistence, context compaction, tool approvals, web search, and OpenTelemetry by default, reducing the amount of custom infrastructure code required. Built‑in safety limits and opt‑in controls for shell access or background sub‑agents give teams predictable runtime behavior and let them enforce governance through existing observability pipelines.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
The Agent Framework Harness moves from an SDK-only library to a production‑ready runtime that agents execute within.
Foundry Hosted Agents offer a consumption‑based managed target for running agents, eliminating the need to self‑host the harness binary.
Default capabilities such as tool approvals, web search, history persistence, and OpenTelemetry are included, while potentially risky features like shell access remain opt‑in with warnings.
THE CLUSTER