Azure MCP Server is Microsoft's open-source implementation of the Model Context Protocol for Azure. It gives compatible AI agents and developer environments a consistent way to discover and call Azure tools across many services, so an agent can inspect resources, query data and monitoring, and prepare or perform operations from the IDE or terminal. It is part of the microsoft/mcp repository, which collects Microsoft's official MCP servers, and can be used alone or with the GitHub Copilot for Azure extension.
Version 3.0, released as stable on October 12, 2026 after 50 beta iterations, adds operational toolsets: Azure Backup (vaults, policies, protected items, jobs and recovery points), Azure Resilience Management (recovery plans, readiness checks, failover validation and drills) and a 55-command Azure SRE Agent toolset. New Azure Terraform tools retrieve AzureRM/AzAPI provider docs and Azure Verified Modules, export existing resources with aztfexport and validate plans with conftest, while Azure Advisor and Optimization tools rank cost recommendations. Monitor, Cosmos DB, IoT Hub, Compute, App Service and other toolsets were extended.
3.0 also brings a new tool design with clearer descriptions for LLM tool selection, opt-in structured output, a --learn flag to explore commands without executing Azure operations, and security-focused defaults for newly created resources (for example Storage accounts with Shared Key auth disabled and Recovery Services vaults without public networking). There are breaking changes for anyone upgrading from 2.0 or a 3.0 preview, so Microsoft recommends reviewing the 3.x changelog and testing clients first.
Installation options include the VS Code extension, Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, Google Antigravity, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI configurations, NuGet, npm, PyPI, Docker and MCPB, plus self-hosted remote deployment. The server is free and MIT-licensed; you pay only for the Azure resources and operations it uses. Telemetry is on by default and sends usage data to Microsoft; setting AZURE_MCP_COLLECT_TELEMETRY=false disables all telemetry.
