Project connection

In the Ultra Transcenders books

AI-103

Each book explains Project connection in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• Foundry project

  A container beneath a Foundry resource that keeps one team's agents, data, files, evaluations and project connections separate. Model deployments and resource-level connections are shared from the parent, and governance is not configured at this level.

• General-purpose v1

  The older storage account kind (Storage), which lacks access tiers, Archive and premium file shares and retires on 13 October 2026. Converting to ZRS requires first upgrading to GPv2, a one-way change.

• Azure AI Search

  Managed Azure service that builds indexes over your content and answers keyword, vector, hybrid and semantically ranked queries, optionally with AI enrichment. Retrieval-augmented generation, Foundry agents and knowledge mining all use it to fetch relevant content.

• API

  Short for application programming interface: a contract that client code calls programmatically, for example a web API secured with tokens or the Files, Images or Responses APIs.

• Index field attributes

  Settings applied to each field in an Azure AI Search index: searchable for full text, retrievable to return it, filterable for exact-match $filter, sortable, facetable for counts, and key for the unique document ID.

• Microsoft Entra ID

  Cloud identity service from Microsoft, previously named Azure AD, which provides the tenant behind Microsoft 365 and Azure.

• Authentication

  Checking an identity claim made by a person, device or app, for instance by asking for a password plus an extra factor. Authorisation only happens once this step has succeeded.

• Connection

  Resource that attaches a virtual network gateway to its peer, which may be an ExpressRoute circuit, a second VNet gateway (Vnet2Vnet) or a local network gateway over IPsec. Resetting it recovers a single tunnel and avoids rebooting the whole gateway.

Related terms

• Azure AI Search tool

  Tool that lets an agent query an Azure AI Search index that already exists. You supply project_connection_id and index_name; by default it runs vector_semantic_hybrid queries and returns five results (top_k 5).

• Custom keys connection

  Foundry connection that holds any key-value secrets you choose. Name an API key to match the securitySchemes entry in an OpenAPI spec, for example, and the header is supplied for you at run time.

• Grounding with Bing Search

  Tool that lets an agent cite live public web results from Bing when answering, connected via a Bing project connection. Search queries are sent beyond the Azure compliance boundary.

• Microsoft Fabric data agent tool

  Lets a Foundry agent put questions to a Fabric data agent about enterprise analytics data; requests travel over a project connection on behalf of the user who is signed in.

• OpenAPI tool

  With an OpenAPI 3 spec describing an external REST API, an agent can call that API through this tool. API-key authentication means declaring an apiKey scheme in securitySchemes and binding a project connection that stores the key.