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Foundry Local
Scope
Foundry Local running on a single Windows Server that you own, Arc-enabled for governance of the host. One of the three targets in ADR-0011. Compare all three targets on the Deployment targets hub.
This target has not been built yet
No deployment exists for this target and no automation is written. The pages in this section are drawn from SPIKE-08, SPIKE-18, and ADR-0013. Treat them as a design.
One server, one service, one inference endpoint. This is the smallest of the three targets and the fastest to stand up, and it is the one whose limits are easiest to misread.
Read this before choosing it
Arc governs the act of installing and configuring the host. It does not govern the running inference service. That endpoint has no Azure RBAC, no Entra authentication, no Key Vault path, no budget, and no Azure Monitor. ADR-0013 decision 10 states this in terms and amends ADR-0011's three-track table, which over-stated it.
That makes this target right for a developer workstation, a single-purpose appliance, a lab, or a workload whose security boundary is the machine itself. It makes it wrong for a shared service that several people or systems call. If you need a governed on-premises endpoint, the target you want is Azure Local.
What it runs
The Foundry Local catalog only. No image generation, no text to speech, no video. The committed first increment is CPU-only, in the Phi-4-mini-instruct-generic-cpu class at roughly 4.8 GB. Whisper speech to text is available.
Section contents
| Topic | Summary |
|---|---|
| Hardware sizing | Supported devices, accelerator paths, and workload profiles from a small CPU model through 20B-class evaluation |
| Architecture | Arc-enabled host, four-stage idempotent install, model cache as the unit of state |
| Models | Foundry Local catalog, CPU-first, roughly a 5 GB quantized 4B-class ceiling |
| Features | OpenAI-compatible local API, foundry CLI, SDKs, fully disconnected operation |
| Deployment | Arc run command, machine-wide MSIX provisioning, not winget |
| Consumption | Local OpenAI-compatible endpoint, unauthenticated |
| Cost | No Azure spend for the runtime; the cost is hardware you already own |
| Security | Arc system-assigned managed identity, one scoped exception to ADR-0005 |
| Operations | Idempotent re-run contract, metadata-only observability |
What stands between this and a real deployment
Two read-only questions, then one owner-authorized install test on a dedicated disposable Windows Server build VM. That single test closes three open unknowns at once, including the largest: whether Windows Server is supported at all, as opposed to the Windows 11 build the quickstart names.