Microsoft Agent Framework Harness and Hosted Agents Reach General Availability
Microsoft has released its Agent Framework and Foundry Hosted Agents to general availability, providing a standardized runtime for AI agents. The framework simplifies the development of autonomous agents by integrating tools like memory, planning, and observability into a single managed service.
Why it matters
This release marks a shift toward enterprise-grade, production-ready AI agent deployment, reducing the engineering burden for companies building multi-step autonomous systems.
InfoQ Homepage News Microsoft Agent Framework Harness and Hosted Agents Reach General Availability
Earlier, InfoQ covered the framework's launch as the open-source consolidation of Semantic Kernel and AutoGen. The 1.0 release settled the build-time question of which framework to use and moved both predecessors to maintenance mode. The Build announcements address the run-time questions that follow: where agents execute, what they are allowed to touch, and how their behavior surfaces in existing observability and policy systems.
The harness is the center of that story. As Microsoft principal software engineer Wes Steyn put it :
A model on its own can only generate text.
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