What's new in Azure Container Apps

This article lists significant updates and new features available in Azure Container Apps.

November 2023

Feature	Description
Generally Available: Landing zone accelerators	Landing zone accelerators provide architectural guidance, reference architecture, reference implementations and automation packaged to deploy workload platforms on Azure at scale.
Public Preview: Dedicated GPU workload profiles	Azure Container Apps support GPU compute in their dedicated workload profiles to unlock machine learning computing for event driven workloads.
Public preview: Vector database add-ons	Azure Container Apps now provides add-ons for three open source vector database variants: Qdrant, Milvus and Weaviate.
Public preview: Policy-driven resiliency	The new resiliency feature enables you to seamlessly recover from service-to-service request and outbound dependency failures just by adding simple policies.
Public preview: Code to cloud	Azure Container Apps now automatically builds and packages application code for deployment.

September 2023

Feature	Description
Generally Available: Azure Container Apps in China Cloud	Azure Container Apps is now available in China North 3.
ACA eligible for savings plans	Azure Container Apps is eligible for Azure savings plan for compute.

August 2023

Feature	Description
Generally Available: Dedicated plan	Azure Container Apps dedicated plan is now generally available in the new workload profiles environment type. When using dedicated workload profiles you're billed per compute instance, compared to consumption where you're billed per app.
Generally Available: UDR, NAT Gateway, and smaller subnets	Improved networking features now allow you to have greater control of egress and support smaller subnets in workload profiles environments.
Generally Available: Azure Container Apps jobs	In addition to continuously running services that can scale to zero, Azure Container Apps now supports jobs. Jobs enable you to run serverless containers that perform tasks that run to completion.
Generally Available: Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)	The CORS feature allows specific origins to make calls on their app through the browser. Azure Container Apps customers can now easily set up Cross Origin Resource Sharing from the portal or through the CLI.
Generally Available: Init containers	Init containers are specialized containers that run to completion before application containers are started in a replica. They can contain utilities or setup scripts not present in your container app image.
Generally Available: Secrets volume mounts	In addition to referencing secrets as environment variables, you can now mount secrets as volumes in your container apps. Your apps can access all or selected secrets as files in a mounted volume.
Generally Available: Session affinity	Session affinity enables you to route all requests from a single client to the same Container Apps replica. This is useful for stateful workloads that require session affinity.
Generally Available: Azure Key Vault references for secrets	Azure Key Vault references enable you to source a container app’s secrets from secrets stored in Azure Key Vault. Using the container app's managed identity, the platform automatically retrieves the secret values from Azure Key Vault and injects it into your application's secrets.
Public preview: additional TCP ports	Azure Container Apps now support additional TCP ports, enabling applications to accept TCP connections on multiple ports. This feature is in preview.
Public preview: environment level mTLS encryption	When end-to-end encryption is required, mTLS will encrypt data transmitted between applications within an environment.
Retirement: ACA preview API versions 2022-06-01-preview and 2022-11-01-preview	Starting on November 16, 2023, Azure Container Apps control plane API versions 2022-06-01-preview and 2022-11-01-preview will be retired. Before that date, migrate to the latest stable API version (2023-05-01) or latest preview API version (2023-04-01-preview).
Dapr: Stable Configuration API	Dapr's Configuration API is now stable and supported in Azure Container Apps. Learn how to do Dapr integration with Azure Container Apps

June 2023

Feature	Description
Generally Available: Running status	The running status helps monitor a container app's health and functionality.
Public Preview: Azure Functions for cloud-native microservices	Azure Function’s host, runtime, extensions and Azure Function apps can be deployed as containers into the same compute environment. You can use centralized networking, observability, and configuration boundary for multi-type application development like microservices.
Public Preview: Azure Spring Apps on Azure Container Apps	Azure Spring apps can be deployed as containers to your Azure Container Apps within the same compute environment, so you can use centralized networking, observability, and configuration boundary for multitype application development like microservices.
Public Preview: Azure Container Apps add-ons	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."
Public Preview: Free and managed TLS certificates	Managed certificates are free and enable you to automatically provision and renew TLS certificates for any custom domain you add to your container app.
Dapr: Multi-app Run improved	Use dapr run -f . to run multiple Dapr apps and see the app logs written to the console and a local log file. Learn how to use multi-app Run logs.

May 2023

Feature	Description
Generally Available: Inbound IP restrictions	Enables container apps to restrict inbound HTTP or TCP traffic by allowing or denying access to a specific list of IP address ranges.
Generally Available: TCP support	Azure Container Apps now supports using TCP-based protocols other than HTTP or HTTPS for ingress.
Generally Available: GitHub Actions for Azure Container Apps	Azure Container Apps allows you to use GitHub Actions to publish revisions to your container app.
Generally Available: Azure Pipelines for Azure Container Apps	Azure Container Apps allows you to use Azure Pipelines to publish revisions to your container app.
Dapr: Easy component creation	You can now configure and secure dependent Azure services to use Dapr APIs in the portal using the Service Connector feature. Learn how to connect to Azure services via Dapr components in the Azure portal.