Azure Container Apps is a modern PaaS platform designed for container-first Cloud Native apps and microservices. Azure Container Apps delivers a fully serverless pay-per-use Consumption hosting option with event-driven scale all the way to 0 as well as Dedicated specialized compute hosting options. New announcements including GPU enabled compute, add-ons for popular vector databases, integrated cloud build, and resiliency policies are now available to support your intelligent apps and microservices!
Flexible Compute Options
Apps can have specialized compute needs depending on their custom business logic and development stack. Applied AI apps for model training, batch inferencing with heavy pre and post processing, video processing, and more may require GPU enabled compute for optimal performance. Azure Container Apps environments can define multiple workload profiles across Consumption and Dedicated plans for optimized spend and performance. The newest workload profiles are GPU enabled! You can now create Azure Container Apps environments with NC A100 v4 GPU enabled compute in the West US 3 and North Europe Azure regions. To learn more please review the workload profiles documentation.
Extensibility with Add-ons
Intelligent apps often require connections to other OSS components such as databases. Azure Container Apps supports extending your apps and microservices with add-ons to enable quick creation of development-grade services hosted in the same Azure Container Apps environment as the custom business logic for the solution without the burden of manual downloads, creation, and configuration. Popular vector databases Qdrant, Milvus, and Weaviate are now available as Azure Container Apps add-ons enabling developers to make their own data available as embeddings to LLMs. To learn more please see the Azure Container Apps add-ons overview.
Best Practices for Microservices
The Azure Container Apps platform includes the Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) CNCF project to encapsulate best practices for microservices. The Dapr representation of these best practices benefits from an active open source development community and from growing industry adoption, ultimately translating to an optional set of incrementally adoptable features that simplify authoring distributed microservices. As microservices solutions grow in scale and complexity, the potential for system failures also increases. Azure Container Apps now features fault tolerance resiliency policies, including those offered in Dapr. Resiliency policies can proactively prevent, detect, and recover from service request failures when initiating requests via Azure Container Apps service discovery or across multiple outbound and inbound operation directions via a Dapr component. To learn more please refer to the resiliency overview doc.
Azure Container Apps resiliency policies
High Productivity Developer Experience
Containers enable portability, reliability, and isolation for your apps by packaging code and dependencies together in a standard format. The Azure Container Apps platform makes it easy to work with containers by design. You can now deploy to Azure Container Apps starting from artifacts, code, or containers. New integrated cloud build capabilities and use of CNCF Buildpacks enable any developer to build and run their apps on Azure Container Apps with no container knowledge required.
Azure Container Apps code to cloud deployment powered by integrated cloud build
For the new prebuilt artifact files deployment option including JAR files, please see the artifact to cloud quickstart.
Reference Architecture Resources
To help you explore Azure Container Apps and typical Enterprise design considerations, please review the Azure Container Apps landing zone accelerator. Landing zone accelerators provide architectural guidance, reference implementation, and automation to enable Azure solution deployment at scale. The Azure Container Apps Landing Zone Accelerator is now generally available including workload profiles and jobs resources! Visit the Azure Container Apps landing zone accelerator repo to get started.
We’re looking forward to the solutions you and your team will deploy to Azure Container Apps!
To learn more:
- Join one of the following sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2023:
- Review the Azure Container Apps docs.
- Learn more about pricing details from the Azure Container Apps pricing page.
- Reach us directly at any time via our GitHub microsoft/azure-container-apps repo.