Microsoft Foundry private skill catalogs enter public preview

Microsoft has made private skill catalogs for Foundry available in public preview. The feature, documented in Azure's preview documentation, lets organizations register agent skills in an Azure API Center and make them discoverable to developers within their Foundry projects.

In Foundry's model, a skill is a reusable capability — instructions, bundled scripts, and tool references — that an agent can consume to extend what it does. The new catalog flow treats Azure API Center as the registry: skills are registered as assets under the API Center's inventory, each carrying a title, summary, description, lifecycle stage, and the source URL of the Git repository holding the code.

The "allowed tools" list is a key part of the design. When a skill is registered, the administrator explicitly names the APIs or MCP servers from the API inventory that the skill may access. Per the documentation, the list is the governance boundary: a shared skill cannot reach endpoints that were never approved. This is what prevents an organization-wide skill from serving as a route to unvetted resources.

Administration and consumption are split across two roles. Catalog admins create the API Center resource, register skills, define allowed tools, and can optionally run an AI assessment against each registered skill using default or custom criteria — name, score range, pass threshold, and weight. Developers are granted the Azure API Center Data Reader role (or an equivalent) and then discover the catalog in the Foundry portal under Build > Skills, where they see each skill's summary, source, compatibility, and allowed tools.

Two operational details are worth noting. First, RBAC role assignments can take up to 24 hours to propagate, so a missing catalog is not necessarily misconfiguration. Second, the catalog stays in sync with source code through an optional Git repository integration, rather than requiring manual re-uploads; the documentation lists "Git sync hasn't run" as one of the known reasons a registered skill may fail to appear.

The troubleshooting table in the documentation maps out the feature's failure modes. A catalog that doesn't appear points to RBAC or the wrong Foundry project. A skill that runs but cannot reach a resource points to a missing entry in its allowed tools. A skill source that can't be opened means the repository URL is wrong or the repo is private. The structure suggests the catalog's practical operation depends on IAM propagation, sync timing, and disciplined tool scoping.

This is a preview feature, offered without a service-level agreement and explicitly not recommended for production workloads. Certain capabilities may be unsupported or constrained. The documentation also points to a broader pattern — Foundry's tool catalog and a separate private tool catalog preview — suggesting Microsoft is building out a family of governance controls for what agents can see and touch, with the skill catalog as one instance.