[Initiative] 🛡️ Ongoing: Maintenance, Support & Platform Health

## Problem statement

Azure MCP Server requires sustained maintenance beyond feature delivery. Dependency updates, service changes, issue response, release support, compatibility work, operational health, and technical debt compete for attention unless they are tracked as an explicit ongoing investment.

## Vision

Azure MCP Server remains supportable, current, and healthy through predictable maintenance practices, responsive issue handling, clear ownership, and continuous reduction of operational and technical risk.

## Who this helps

- **Users** receive timely fixes, current dependencies, and clear support outcomes.
- **Contributors** work from a maintained codebase with dependable engineering systems.
- **Service teams** have a clear path for escalations and compatibility updates.
- **Maintainers** can balance planned delivery with operational health and debt reduction.

## Goals (in scope)

- Track recurring maintenance, dependency, release, and compatibility work
- Improve support triage, escalation, and issue-resolution practices
- Address technical debt and operational risks that affect platform health
- Maintain documentation, tooling, and engineering systems required for sustained delivery

## Non-goals (out of scope)

- Using this initiative as a catch-all for untriaged feature requests
- Replacing specific incidents, bugs, or maintenance work items
- Hiding recurring work that should be automated or assigned explicit ownership

## Success criteria

- [ ] Ongoing work is represented by linked child issues with owners and service expectations
- [ ] Critical dependencies and supported platforms remain current
- [ ] Support and release health are tracked with actionable signals
- [ ] Recurring manual maintenance is documented, automated, or explicitly accepted

## Dependencies

- Maintainer and service-team support rotations
- Upstream Azure service, SDK, MCP protocol, and host changes
- Release, dependency, CI, and repository administration systems

No specific file, test, or entry point is named. Start by breaking the initiative into specific child issues with owners and service expectations; completion means maintenance work is tracked, dependencies and platforms stay current, support and release health have actionable signals, and recurring work is documented or automated.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.