General Availability: Standby Pools for Azure Container Instances

We’re excited to announce that Standby Pools for Azure Container Instances (ACI) are now generally available!

Standby Pools allow you to create a pool of pre-provisioned, pre-initialized container groups that are ready to receive workloads instantly. This capability significantly reduces cold start latency and enhances responsiveness for bursty, event-driven, or latency-sensitive applications.

Whether you're running APIs, background jobs, or microservices that need to scale quickly, Standby Pools help ensure your containers are ready when you need them—without the wait.

Key Benefits

• Instant startup: Containers are pre-warmed and ready to serve traffic immediately.
• Flexible configuration: Apply configuration changes without triggering redeployments.
• Scalable automation: Integrate with container group profiles to streamline and standardize deployments across environments.
• Improved reliability: Reduce variability in startup times and improve user experience during traffic spikes.

Use Cases

• Real-time data processing
• Event-driven workloads
• Interactive applications with unpredictable traffic

Get Started

To learn how to create and manage standby pools, see Standby Pools for Azure Container Instances Documentation