Microsoft’s flagship container hosting services target different types of workloads. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides a fully managed Kubernetes system giving developers and DevOps professionals Kubernetes API access and the use of the kubectl command-line utility. Azure Container Apps (ACA) is a serverless implementation of Kubernetes which allows developers to simply upload containers into a Kubernetes environment; however, it does not provide Kubernetes API or kubectl access and has lower capacity limits. Azure Container Instances (ACI), the first of Azure’s container hosting services, is not based on Kubernetes. 

Azure offers three primary Azure container hosting services as shown in the accompanying chart.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), the flagship Kubernetes offering, provides a fully managed implementation of Kubernetes leveraging Azure services (such as Azure Container Registry and Azure Active Directory) but otherwise offers a full Kubernetes deployment and management experience. AKS supports the Kubernetes management tools, including kubectl, and the full range of Kubernetes add-ons, such as Istio, the Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaler (KEDA), and others.

Azure Container Instances (ACI), an earlier container-hosting service, is not based on Kubernetes. It does support confidential containers, which encrypt containers and data in memory, but not Kubernetes add-ons such as Istio.

A newer service, Azure Container Apps (ACA), provides a serverless implementation of Kubernetes; teams do not have access to Kubernetes management tools but can simply load container code into the ACA environment. However, ACA has limits on the number of instances enabled, so applications requiring larger scale should consider AKS.