Today we’re announcing the preview release of two new features for Azure Container Apps (ACA) related to service management
An alternative hosting option for runtime services
Prior to today's announcement user's options for runtime services was a choice between Azure managed services (such as Azure Cache for Redis), or self-hosting the service as an ACA app (typically using an open-source version). Now there's another option through add-ons. Add-ons are Microsoft curated containers that are intended for development use where the full enterprise-grade quality of Azure managed services is not needed.
Add-ons start quickly and share many of the same features as ACA apps themselves - such as scaling down to zero when not being used. Additionally, they will automatically have persistent storage associated with them so their data will not be lost during those idle times. These are great alternatives for development environments. For our initial public preview release Redis and PostgreSQL are available - with more in the pipeline!
New streamlined process by which you can connect your applications to services
ACA is introducing a new process for connecting your application to service regardless of whether those services are the Add-ons or Azure managed services. Through a simplified CLI experience, developers (with just a few words on the command line) can connect their apps to both types of runtime services and ACA will automatically set the proper secure networking and auto-inject the connection information into the application as environment variables. This makes connecting to and switching between Add-ons and managed services a trivial task.
Service Add-ons can also be deployed using Azure Dev CLI (azd), through the use of Bicep templates. Customers can combine these with App Spaces (preview), to deploy entire applications from the Azure management portal without having to worry about any additional tooling.
If you'd like more information about ACA Add-ons or would like to get started with ACA Add-ons try our tutorial. We hope you find this new feature useful and look forward to hearing about the applications you build with it.
Demo showing Azure Container App Add-ons and bindings in action.