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Connect to services in Azure Container Apps (preview)

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As you develop applications in Azure Container Apps, you often need to connect to different services. Rather than creating services ahead of time and manually connecting them to your container app, you can quickly create instances of development-grade services that are designed for nonproduction environments known as add-ons.

Add-ons allow you to use OSS services without the burden of manual downloads, creation, and configuration.

Once you're ready for your app to use a production level service, you can connect your application to an Azure managed service.

Services available as an add-on include:

Title Service name
Kafka kafka
MariaDB mariadb
Milvus milvus
PostgreSQL (open source) postgres
Qdrant qdrant
Redis (open source) redis
Weaviate weaviate

You can get most recent list of add-on services by running the following command:

az containerapp service --help

See the section on how to manage a service for usage instructions.

Features

Add-ons come with the following features:

  • Scope: The add-on runs in the same environment as the connected container app.
  • Scaling: The add-on can scale in to zero when there's no demand for the service.
  • Pricing: Add-on billing falls under consumption-based pricing. Billing only happens when instances of the add-on are running.
  • Storage: The add-on uses persistent storage to ensure there's no data loss as the add-on scales in to zero.
  • Revisions: Anytime you change an add-on, a new revision of your container app is created.

See the service-specific features for managed services.

Binding

Both add-ons and managed services connect to a container via a binding.

The Container Apps runtime binds a container app to a service by:

  • Discovering the service
  • Extracting networking and connection configuration values
  • Injecting configuration and connection information into container app environment variables

Once a binding is established, the container app can read these configuration and connection values from environment variables.

Development vs production

As you move from development to production, you can move from an add-on to a managed service.

The following table shows you which service to use in development, and which service to use in production.

Functionality Add on Production managed service
Cache Open-source Redis Azure Cache for Redis
Database N/A Azure Cosmos DB
Database Open-source PostgreSQL Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server

You're responsible for data continuity between development and production environments.

Manage a service

To connect a service to an application, you first need to create the service.

Use the containerapp service <SERVICE_TYPE> create command with the service type and name to create a new service.

az containerapp service redis create \
  --name myredis \
  --environment myenv

This command creates a new Redis service called myredis in a Container Apps environment called myenv.

To bind a service to an application, use the --bind argument for containerapp create.

az containerapp create \
  --name myapp \
  --image myimage \
  --bind myredis \
  --environment myenv

This command features the typical Container App create with the --bind argument. The bind argument tells the Container Apps runtime to connect a service to the application.

The --bind argument is available to the create or update commands.

To disconnect a service from an application, use the --unbind argument on the update command

The following example shows you how to unbind a service.

az containerapp update --name myapp --unbind myredis

For a full tutorial on connecting to services, see Connect services in Azure Container Apps.

For more information on the service commands and arguments, see the az containerapp reference.

Limitations

  • Add-ons are in public preview.
  • Any container app created before May 23, 2023 isn't eligible to use add-ons.
  • Add-ons come with minimal guarantees. For instance, they're automatically restarted if they crash, however there's no formal quality of service or high-availability guarantees associated with them. For production workloads, use Azure-managed services.
  • If you use your own VNET, you must use a workload profiles environment. The Add-ons feature is not supported in consumption only environments that use custom VNETs.

Next steps

Connect services to a container app