Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that runs microservices and containerized applications on Azure. It provides built-in autoscaling, including scale to zero, and offers simplified developer experience with support for multiple programming languages and frameworks, including special features built for .NET and Java. Container Apps also provides many advanced networking and monitoring capabilities, offering seamless deployment and management of containerized applications without the need to manage underlying infrastructure.
Following the features announced at Ignite’24, we've continued to innovate and enhance Azure Container Apps. We announced the general availability of Serverless GPUs, enabling seamless AI workloads with automatic scaling, optimized cold start, per-second billing, and reduced operational overhead. We added a preview of JavaScript code interpreter support for Dynamic Sessions for applications that require the execution of potentially malicious JavaScript code, such as code provided by end users. Furthermore, we partnered with Aqua Security to enhance the security of Azure Container Apps, offering comprehensive image scanning, runtime protection, and supply chain security.
These advancements ensure that Azure Container Apps remains a trusted platform for running scalable, secure, and resilient containerized applications. The features we're announcing at Build’25 for new Serverless GPUs integrations, and many new networking and observability features that Enterprises care about further deepens this commitment.
Running AI workloads on Azure Container Apps
Azure Container Apps efficiently supports AI workloads with features like serverless GPUs with NVIDIA NIM integration, dynamic sessions with Hyper-V isolation, and integrations for enhanced performance and scalability. We are furthering this feature set by announcing new capabilities and integrations for Azure Container Apps.
Deploy Foundry Models on Serverless GPUs for Inferencing
Azure Container Apps now provides an integration with Foundry Models, which allows you to deploy ready-to-use AI models directly during container app creation. This integration supports serverless APIs with pay-as-you-go billing and managed compute with pay-per-GPU pricing, providing flexibility in deploying Foundry models.
Announcing General Availability of Dedicated GPUs
Dedicated GPUs in Azure Container Apps are now generally available, and simplify AI application development and deployment by reducing management overhead. It offers built-in support for key components like the latest CUDA driver, turnkey networking, and security features, allowing you to focus on your AI application code.
Early access to Serverless GPU in Dynamic Sessions
Serverless GPU in Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions in now available as an early access feature, enable running untrusted AI-generated code at scale within compute sandboxes protected by Hyper-V isolation. This feature supports a GPU-powered Python code interpreter to better handle AI workloads. Microsoft Dev Box offers an integration with Serverless GPU in Dynamic Sessions through the Dev Box GPU Shell feature.
Advanced Networking capabilities
Azure Container Apps offers many networking capabilities including custom VNet integration, private endpoints, user-defined routes, NAT Gateway support, and peer-to-peer encryption. We are extending these capabilities by offering new controls and features to support more nuanced network architectures.
Announcing General Availability of Private Endpoints
Private Endpoints for Azure Container Apps, now generally available, allows customers to connect to their Container Apps environment using a private IP address in their Azure Virtual Network. This eliminates exposure to the public internet and secures access to their applications. Additionally, customers can connect directly from Azure Front Door to their workload profile environments over a private link instead of the public internet.
New Premium Ingress capabilities
The new premium ingress feature in Azure Container Apps allows for customizable ingress scaling, enabling better handling of higher demand workloads like large performance tests. It introduces environment-level ingress configuration options, including termination grace period, idle request timeout, and header count.
Announcing Public Preview of rule-based routing
We are adding a rule-based routing feature in Azure Container Apps that allows you to direct incoming HTTP traffic to different apps within your Container Apps environment based on the requested host name or path. This simplifies your architecture for microservice applications, A/B testing, blue-green deployments, and more, without needing a separate reverse proxy.
Observability and debugging capabilities
Azure Container Apps provides several built-in observability features that give you a holistic view of your container app’s health throughout its application lifecycle, and help you monitor and diagnose the state of your app to improve performance and respond to trends and critical problems. We are extending these existing capabilities by introducing new observability and debugging features.
Announcing General Availability of Open Telemetry Collector
The OpenTelemetry agent in Azure Container Apps is now generally available, allowing developers to use open-source standards to send app data without setting up the collector themselves. The managed agent collects and exports telemetry data to various endpoints, including Azure Monitor Application Insights, Datadog, and any generic OTLP-configured endpoint.
Announcing General Availability of Aspire dashboard
The .NET 8’s Aspire dashboard in Azure Container Apps is now generally available, providing live data about your project and containers in the cloud to evaluate performance and debug errors with comprehensive logs, metrics, and traces. In addition, we now support the newest version of Aspire (v9.2), which includes new visualization features, the ability to pause/resume telemetry, and will be globally available in the coming weeks.
New Diagnose and Solve dashboard
The new Diagnose and Solve dashboard for Azure Container Apps provides a comprehensive overview of app health, performance, and resource utilization, with insights into apps, jobs, replicas, node count, and CPU usage over time. It also includes new detectors to diagnose and resolve issues such as container create failures, health probe failures, and image pull failures.
Integration with Azure SRE agent
Azure Container Apps integrates seamlessly with the Azure SRE agent to enhance operational efficiency and application uptime. By continuously monitoring application health and performance, the SRE agent provides valuable insights and autonomously responds to production alerts, mitigating issues with minimal intervention. This integration allows developers to leverage the SRE agent to monitor Azure Container Apps resources, from Container App Environments to Apps to Revisions to Replicas, ensuring faster troubleshooting and proactive issue resolution.
Enhanced Enterprise capabilities
In addition to these announcements, we are introducing several enhanced Enterprise features to Azure Container Apps.
Announcing General Availability of Azure Container Apps on Arc-enabled Kubernetes
The ability to run Azure Container Apps on your own Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters (AKS and AKS-HCI) is now generally available. This allows developers to leverage Azure Container Apps features while IT administrators maintain corporate compliance by hosting applications in hybrid environments.
Announcing General Availability of Planned Maintenance in Azure Container Apps
Planned Maintenance for Azure Container Apps is now generally available, which allows you to control when non-critical updates are applied to your environment. This helps minimize downtime and impact on applications. Critical updates are applied as needed to ensure security and reliability compliance.
Announcing Public Preview of workflow capabilities with Durable Task Scheduler
The new advanced pro-code workflow feature in Azure Container Apps, leveraging durable task scheduler, is now in public preview. With durable task scheduler in Container Apps, you can create reliable workflows as code, leveraging state persistence and fault-tolerant execution. These containerized workflows enhance scalability, reliability, and streamlined monitoring for administration of complex workflows.
Native Azure Functions in Azure Container Apps
The new, streamlined method for running Azure Functions natively in Azure Container Apps allows customers to leverage the full features and capabilities of Azure Container Apps while benefiting from the simplicity of auto-scaling provided by Azure Functions. With the new native hosting model, customers can deploy Azure Functions directly onto Azure Container Apps with the same experience as deploying other containerized applications. Customers can also get the complete feature set of Azure Container Apps with this new deployment experience, including multi-revision management, easy authentication, metrics and alerting, health probes and many more.
Azure Container Apps at Build’25 conference
Also, if you're at Build, come see us at the following sessions:
- Breakout 182: Better Microservices Development using Azure Container Apps
- Breakout 190: Secure Next-Gen AI Apps with Azure Container Apps Serverless GPUs
- Lab 341: Agentic AI Inferencing with Azure Container Apps
- Community Table Talk 457: App Reliability, Azure Container Apps, & Serverless GPUs
- Breakout 186: Earth’s Defense with Hera: AI Agents Battle Planet Extinction Threats
- Breakout 187: Event-Driven Architectures: Serverless Apps That Slay at Scale
- Breakout 201: Innovate, deploy, & optimize your apps without infrastructure hassles
- Breakout 117: Use VS Code to build AI apps and agents
- Breakout 185: Maximizing efficiency in cloud-native app design
- Demo 544: Building Resilient Cloud-Native Microservices
Or come talk to us at the Serverless booth at the Expert Meet-up area at the Hub!
Wrapping up
As always, we invite you to visit our GitHub page for feedback, feature requests, or questions about Azure Container Apps, where you can open a new issue or up-vote existing ones. If you’re curious about what we’re working on next, check out our roadmap. We look forward to hearing from you!
Microsoft