What's new in Azure Container Apps
This article lists significant updates and new features available in Azure Container Apps.
May 2024
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Generally Available: Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps | 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: Dynamic sessions | This fast, sandboxed, ephemeral compute is suitable for running untrusted code at scale in hostile multi-tenancy scenarios. Each session has full compute isolation using Hyper-V. |
| Public preview: Aspire dashboard support | Access live data about your .NET project and containers in the cloud to evaluate the performance of your applications and debug errors with comprehensive logs, metrics, traces, and more. |
| Public Preview: NFS Azure Files volume mount support | You can use NFS Azure Files volumes to share data between multiple containers in your application, or to persist data across container restarts. |
| Public Preview: Monitor apps with Java metrics | You can now monitor the performance and health of your apps with Java metrics such as garbage collection and memory usage. |
| Public Preview: Set Java log levels | You can now set Java application log levels in Azure Container Apps without redeploying or restarting your apps. |
March 2024
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Generally Available: Free managed 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. |
| Public Preview: OpenTelemetry Agent support | Allows you to use open-source standards to send your app’s data without setting up an OTLP collector yourself. You can use the managed agent to choose where to send logs, metrics, and traces. |
| Public preview: Support for Key Vault Certificates | Use Azure Key Vault to store and manage your own TLS/SSL certificates for use with Azure Container Apps at the app and environment level. |
| Public Preview: Tomcat support | Azure Container Apps now supports Apache Tomcat in the code-to-cloud build process. This means that you can use your existing code, and configuration, to create a cloud-native container app without the hassle. |
| Public Preview: JVM memory fit | All Java apps are now calibrated with JVM memory defaults for better performance and reliability in container environment. |
| Public Preview: Managed Java components: Eureka Server and Public Preview: Managed Java components: Config Server | You can use managed Java components to access platform features for your apps that you would otherwise have to manage yourself. |
January 2024
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Generally Available: 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. |
December 2023
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Retirement: ACA preview API versions 2022-06-01-preview and 2022-11-01-preview | Starting on March 6, 2024, Azure Container Apps control plane API versions 2023-04-01-preview will be retired. Before that date, migrate to the latest stable API version (2023-05-01) or latest preview API version (2023-08-01-preview). |
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 peer-to-peer encryption | When end-to-end encryption is required, peer-to-peer encryption 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. |