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 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. At the same time, it offers enterprise-grade features such as configurable network topology, secret and key management, and robust security and governance, making it a trusted platform for mission-critical and high-security workloads. The features we're announcing at Ignite'24 for Serverless GPUs, intelligent apps, and other Enterprise features to further deepen this commitment.
Azure Container Apps Serverless GPUs
One of the major pain points for customers has been the complexity and cost associated with deploying and monetizing custom models, fine-tuned models, and other open-source models within their environment. Managing the necessary infrastructure and ensuring data governance can be both time-consuming and expensive.
To address this challenge, we're thrilled to announce the public preview of Azure Container Apps Serverless GPUs, bringing the power of NVIDIA A100 and T4 GPUs to a serverless environment. This feature allows AI development teams to focus on their core AI code without worrying about managing infrastructure. With serverless GPUs, you get a middle layer between Azure AI Model Catalog's serverless APIs and hosting models on managed compute, ensuring full data governance as your data never leaves the container boundaries.
Serverless GPUs offer several key benefits, including scale-to-zero capabilities, built-in data governance, and flexible compute options with NVIDIA A100 and T4 GPUs. This managed, serverless compute platform is perfect for a wide range of AI workloads, from real-time inferencing with custom models to fine-tuning generative AI models and video rendering.
Available now in West US 3 and Australia East regions, serverless GPUs can be easily set up through the Azure portal or CLI. To get started, ensure you have quota enabled on your subscription. This new feature is designed to meet the growing demands of modern applications, providing powerful GPU resources without the need for dedicated infrastructure management.
Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions
Azure Container Apps dynamic sessions, announced in May 2024, is now generally available. This feature provides instant access to compute sandboxes for running untrusted code at scale, with each session protected by industry-standard Hyper-V isolation.
Dynamic sessions are available in two modes: Python code interpreter and custom container sessions. The Python code interpreter sessions offer easy access to built-in Python code interpreter sandboxes, while custom container sessions allow users to run any custom container, supporting any scenario where sandboxes are needed to run untrusted code or applications.
Additionally, the public preview of JavaScript code interpreter sessions is now available, supporting the execution of untrusted code on the Node.js runtime.
Private Endpoints
Private endpoints are now supported in public preview for workload profile environments in Azure Container Apps. This enables customers to connect to their Container Apps environment using a private IP address in their Azure Virtual Network, eliminating exposure to the public internet and securing access to their applications. With private endpoints, customers can also connect directly from Azure Front Door to their workload profile environments over a private link instead of the public internet. Today, customers can enable Private Link to container apps origin for Azure Front Door through CLI, with portal support coming soon.
Private endpoints will be free during public preview, but this is subject to change upon GA. Currently, private endpoints are only supported for public cloud.
Planned Maintenance
Planned maintenance is now supported in public preview for Azure Container Apps. This CLI feature allows you to control when non-critical updates, such as minor security patches, bug fixes, and new releases, are applied to your Container Apps environment to minimize downtime and impact to applications. To configure a weekly maintenance window, you simply need to specify a day of week, a start time in the UTC time zone, and a duration.
Planned maintenance support is available for all container apps and jobs, except those running on consumption workload profiles. We are working on adding support for these profiles soon. If you’re interested in this feature, please fill out this survey to share your use case and help us prioritize accordingly.
Path-Based Routing Early Access
Path-based routing is now supported as an early-access feature in Azure Container Apps. This feature allows customers to configure routing rules to determine which application traffic entering the Azure Container Apps environment is sent to without the configuration of an additional reverse proxy like nginx. You can configure path-based routing rules for your container apps through ARM or bicep, with CLI support coming shortly. See the quickstart and samples for more guidance and getting started with path-based routing.
.NET Aspire on Azure Container Apps
Earlier this year, we announced the Public Preview of the Aspire Dashboard for Azure Container Apps, providing a developer-centric live view of telemetry across all apps in a container environment. This is helpful to evaluate app performance and debug errors with comprehensive logs, metrics, and traces. At .NET Conf last week, we announced .NET 9, which simplifies the acquisition of .NET Aspire and adds new features like starting and stopping apps from the dashboard, viewing scaled-to-zero apps, and an improved UI. This release is only available in new environments in Australia East, Germany West Central, Italy North, and Switzerland North. Additional regions will be supported in the future.
We also announced preview support for Azure Functions that can be deployed to Azure Container Apps. The new .NET Aspire Azure Functions integration enables developers to develop, debug, and orchestrate Azure Functions .NET projects directly within the app host. This integration supports several key triggers, including Event Hubs, Service Bus, Storage Blobs, and HTTP, providing a versatile and powerful toolset for serverless applications. By leveraging the familiar programming model of Azure Functions and the using existing tools such as Visual Studio and .NET CLI, developers can now seamlessly integrate their serverless workflows into Azure Container Apps, benefiting from the unified environment and streamlined deployment processes.
Java on Azure Container Apps
Azure Container Apps has added multiple features making it an ideal platform for deploying Java Spring applications, offering seamless integration with popular development tools development tools like IntelliJ, VS Code, Maven, and Gradle. The service supports multiple deployment types, including source, binaries, or container images, alongside automation tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins. Additionally, it offers multiple Java specific features required for modern Java deployment requirements, such as out-of-the-box JVM metrics, automatic JVM memory fitting, Java in-process agent for log stream and console, as well as various Spring components as managed services.
Azure Spring Apps is a fully managed service for running Java Spring applications, jointly built by Microsoft and VMware by Broadcom. After careful consideration and analysis, Microsoft and Broadcom made the difficult decision earlier this year to retire the Azure Spring Apps service. Azure Container Apps is the primary recommended target service to migrate workloads running on Azure Spring Apps. See the migration guide to learn how to move any Spring Boot applications to Azure Container apps.
Workload Profile Metrics
We have deployed new workload profile metrics in preview. For apps, we now support CPU Usage Percentage, Memory Percentage, and Average Response Time. These metrics help you understand node capacity and set alerts for performance issues. For environments, we now support Workload Profile Node Count to determine node utilization, so you can update the maximum count. Until the metrics blade is available in the portal for Container App Environments, you can view the new metrics by going to the portal blade for Azure Monitor.
We will continue to add more Azure Container Apps metrics and observability features over time! See the metrics documentation to learn more about the metrics available today.
Azure Container Apps at Ignite’24 conference
Also, if you're at Ignite, come see us at the following sessions:
- Breakout Session 145: Building serverless intelligent apps with Flex Consumption and GPUs
- Breakout Session 146: Streamline AI App development with Azure App Platform
- Breakout Session 147: Modernize and scale enterprise Java applications on Azure
- Breakout Session 144: Delivering business results with app innovation: Customer Insights
- Lab 413: Mastering Azure Container Apps and GenAI for Intelligent Solutions
- Community Roundtable 1008: Empower Devs with Advanced Experiences for Production-Ready AI Apps
- Partner Breakout Session 387: Accelerate generative AI adoption with NVIDIA AI on Azure
Or come talk to us at the Serverless booth at the Expert Meet-up area at the Hub!
Wrapping up
For feedback, feature requests, or questions about Azure Container Apps, visit our GitHub page. You can open a new issue or up-vote existing ones. If you’re curious about what we’re working on next, checkout our roadmap. We look forward to hearing from you!
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