Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers. Azure Container Apps supports a variety of languages and frameworks, making it a versatile platform for developers. The features we're announcing at Build'24 for intelligent apps, Java and .NET Aspire will further deepen this commitment.
Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions
As developers embrace intelligent apps beyond the initial prototyping stage, they often look for production architecture guidance, something we have now made available via Intelligent app on Azure Container Apps.
Many also discover the limitations of the models they use. One such limitation is their inability to do math, or more broadly, execute code. This can be solved through external tooling, but connecting an LLM to an external tool has massive security implications, since the LLM generated code is ultimately untrusted.
Dynamic sessions (sessions) provides a secure way to run untrusted code and hence equip your intelligent app with powerful tooling. Through hot-standby execution environments, sessions lets your application or model execute code and get the result within a few hundred milliseconds. Even better, we're launching this with built-in support across all the major libraries such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, SemanticKernel and more.
We believe this compute form factor will find many more applications, and we are excited to see where those will be. We've already seen use-cases from executable-docs, data processing to SaaS extensibility. For full details and code samples, please see Secure Sandboxes at Scale with Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions.
Java on Azure Container Apps
For Java developers, Azure Container Apps now offers a rich set of operational capabilities. These include native Java metric support, logging, memory fit and Tomcat support. More notably ACA now offers managed Java components. This means that popular application components such as Spring Cloud Config, Spring Cloud Eureka, and others will no longer have to be run and managed by developers but instead will be managed as part of the Azure Container Apps environment. We have a 4 blog series that details all the components and how to use these features:
- Introduction: Running Java applications on Azure Container Apps
- Episode 1 : Build and deploy polyglot apps
- Episode 2 : Run Java web apps on Tomcat
- Episode 3 : Automatic Memory Fit for Java Apps in Azure Container Apps
NET Aspire on Azure Container Apps
.NET Aspire aims to simplify the transition between development and operations and is joining forces with Azure Container Apps to facilitate this path for .NET developers. Together with the Aspire team we're now offering the Aspire dashboard as managed component. This will make it easy for you to run your application without the need to manage some operational aspects. Running the dashboard as part of your Azure Container Apps environment will also provide built-in Azure authentication for the dashboard. For more details on how to use Aspire and Azure Container Apps please see Live data on Azure Container Apps with the Aspire dashboard.
Open Telemetry Collector
For cloud native applications we’ve recently added support for CNCF’s OpenTelemetry (OTel). If your application is instrumented with OTel metrics you can simply configure and enable Azure Container Apps’ managed OTel collector and pipe the data to a variety of Azure or non-Azure destinations. If you currently use OTel and are interested in how Azure Container Apps supports your investment join our Public Preview: Azure Container Apps OpenTelemetry Agent support.
Azure Container Apps at Build’24 conference
Also, if you're at Build, come see us at the following sessions:
- Breakout Session: Serverless architectures: Effortless Intelligent Apps at extreme scale
- Demo: Deploy your .NET microservices to the cloud at lightning speed
- Lab 310: Build a Music Recommendation System with Azure Container Apps and AI
- Lab 341: Get started building Cloud Native apps with .NET Aspire
- Lab 381: Build Intelligent Apps on Azure Container Apps with Azure OpenAI
Or come talk to us at the Serverless booth at the Expert Meet-up area at the Hub!
Learn more about the technology stack powering Azure Container Apps at Project Legion.