Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service for creating and deploying applications. With this service, Microsoft is targeting IT managers who shy away from the complexity and high level of expertise required for container orchestration, but still want to benefit from the advantages of containerized applications.
Kubernetes has become an integral part of application development and companies are faced with the need to adapt this technology. However, many companies do not have the resources and expertise to run Kubernetes themselves. Managed Kubernetes environments such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) make operations easier. These services take over many operational tasks, such as installing the Kubernetes environment and automating patching, recovering from node failures and scaling Kubernetes clusters.
However, IT managers still face many challenges. This is because various other tools such as service meshes, monitoring and logging tools, security applications, devops tools, etc. are often required for productive use. A complex ecosystem of tools has grown up around Kubernetes, which is reflected in the map of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) [1]. The CNCF is an initiative supported by all major manufacturers to promote cloud-native technologies that include a large number of open source products. Due to the highly dynamic nature of the Kubernetes ecosystem, it is difficult for IT managers to maintain an overview.
New service provides helpful tools
With Azure Container Apps (ACA), Microsoft is addressing this problem by providing IT managers with an abstracted PaaS service based on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). In contrast to AKS, Azure Container App is serverless, which means that the customer does not see the underlying virtual machines or the AKS infrastructure on which the containers run and does not have to take care of them. According to Microsoft, there are several scenarios for which Azure Container Apps are particularly suitable: the operation of microservices, event-driven processing, container-based web applications and backend applications as well as for hosting public API endpoints.
