A Senior Engineer’s Guide to Foundry IQ, MCP, and the OpenAI Agents SDK

Most Foundry writeups assume you’re all in on Microsoft’s stack end to end: the Agent Framework for orchestration, the Foundry Agent Service for hosting, and the Responses API wrapped in Microsoft’s own client. That’s a reasonable default, but it’s not the only shape this can take. Microsoft Foundry hosts OpenAI’s own models behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and Foundry IQ exposes every knowledge base as a plain MCP server.