Container Apps

Azure Container Apps (ACA), which became generally available in May 2022, aims to simplify building, deploying, and managing Kubernetes clusters and applications. ACA follows the serverless paradigm and removes the need to access (and prevents access to) the Kubernetes management control plane and APIs, which can reduce the operational burden on developers and administrators. 

Service Overview 

ACA enables containers to be run on a serverless, scalable platform without the overhead of managing a Kubernetes cluster. The service supports several application patterns, including public HTTP endpoints, event-driven processing from message queues, background processing (for example, long-running machine learning training or database transformations), and microservice architectures.  

Containers are deployed within “environments,” which provide isolation boundaries from other applications. An environment may consist of multiple container types. A “replica” represents a workload and is the unit of scalability. However, ACA enforces maximum scale limits, so applications with high scale requirements (more than 30 instances of a container) will need Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).