August is usually a quiet month for Azure headlines, but there are a couple of dated changes worth actually doing something about, plus one platform shift worth keeping an eye on rather than acting on immediately.
AZ-500 retires August 31, ahead of the shift to AI security
The AZ-500 exam and the Azure Security Engineer Associate certification retire on August 31, 2026. The replacement, SC-500 (Cloud and AI Security Engineer Associate), isn’t just a rename, it expands the scope to cover securing AI workloads alongside traditional cloud infrastructure.
If anyone on your team is mid-way through AZ-500 prep, or you’ve been meaning to get someone certified, this is the month to either finish it or switch tracks deliberately rather than by accident. More broadly, the retirement is a signal worth paying attention to on its own: Microsoft is treating AI security as a first-class part of the cloud security skill set now, not an add-on. If your Entra ID and conditional access baseline hasn’t been reviewed with AI workloads in mind, that’s worth putting on the list.
Reserved Instance changes are already live, review before you renew
Since July 1, several older VM series (Av2, Amv2, Bv1, D, Ds, Dv2, Dsv2, F, Fs, Fsv2, G, Gs, Ls, Lsv2, Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3, and Esv3) are no longer available for new Reserved Instance purchases or renewals. If you’re running production workloads on any of these series and have reservations coming up for renewal, you won’t be able to simply renew like-for-like.
This is exactly the kind of thing that gets missed until a renewal notice lands and it’s suddenly urgent. If you haven’t checked your reservation expiry dates against this list yet, August is a good month to do it while there’s still runway to plan a VM series migration rather than scramble through one.
AI platform expansion, worth knowing about, not worth chasing yet
Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 is now available in Microsoft Foundry, and Microsoft Discovery has moved to general availability as a platform for building and governing agentic AI workflows. We’re mentioning this because it’s real and it’s happening, not because we think every business needs an agentic AI strategy this quarter. If you’re already experimenting with AI workloads on Azure, it’s worth knowing Foundry’s model options and governance tooling keep expanding. If you’re not, there’s no need to catch up just because the platform moved, build the foundation first.
What we’re actually doing this month
For clients on a Support Pack, the AZ-500 and Reserved Instance items are going straight into this month’s review rather than waiting for the next scheduled one. If you want a second pair of eyes on either, get in touch.