Azure Updates: Incremental snapshots; Claude Sonnet 4.6; Budget Bytes

Aung Oo, Vice President of Azure Storage, shared new capabilities for instant access incremental snapshots. The new capability offers a snapshot experience for Ultra Disk and Premium SSD v2, allowing users to restore disks without waiting for snapshots to be ready. Microsoft has traditionally offered standard incremental snapshots to create point in-time disk copies for workflows. 

“With instant access snapshots, that wait is gone,” Oo wrote. “As soon as snapshots are created, you can restore new disks from them with near-full performance from the start. This means faster recovery, faster scaling, and faster iteration—redefining what customers should expect from snapshot operations in cloud.”

Microsoft team member Amar Badal explored newly available Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry with Frontier Performance for Scale. With the availability announcement, Microsoft is working to advance frontier AI capabilities for agentic workflows for developers. Currently, Claude Sonnet 4.6 allows end-users to set up agents, code, and workflows with a one million token context window in beta, as well as extended context capabilities. 

According to Badal, enterprise teams can benefit from stronger reasoning across code contexts, new ways to understand complex codebases, and more reliable performance. Sonnet 4.6 gives developers ways to define intent, refine their models, and undertake fewer context resets.