Goodbye Azure Kubernetes Service! Hello Azure Container Apps! - Johnny Hooyberghs - NDC Oslo 2024

Azure Container Apps (ACA) provides a simplified container hosting platform built on top of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), abstracting away infrastructure complexity

Key advantages include:

• Serverless scaling (scale to zero capability)
• Built-in service discovery
• Revision management for A/B testing and gradual rollouts
• Multiple revision support with traffic splitting
• Automatic scaling based on HTTP requests, events, or custom metrics

Dapr integration provides:

• Service-to-service communication
• Built-in resiliency and retries
• State management (Redis cache etc.)
• Pub/sub messaging
• Secret management
• Abstraction for external service communication

Workload profiles allow:

• Choice between consumption (serverless) model
• Custom VM sizes for specific workload needs
• GPU support for specialized workloads

.NET Aspire integration enables:

• Easy local development of distributed applications
• Automatic service discovery
• Dashboard for monitoring
• Simple deployment to Azure Container Apps

Best suited for:

• Simpler distributed applications
• Microservices architectures
• When full Kubernetes complexity isn’t needed
• Development and testing scenarios

Configuration and deployment options:

• Azure Portal
• Azure CLI
• Bicep/ARM templates
• Azure Developer CLI (azd)