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Difficulty: MediumServerless and Web Application Hosting

An insurance company is designing a serverless microservices-based application. The application consists of four containerized services: an API gateway, a customer profile service, a claim intake portal, and a background report generation service that processes heavy PDF claims. The report generation service can take up to 15 minutes to complete a single processing job. The hosting platform must support scaling to zero to minimize costs during idle periods, require minimal infrastructure management overhead, and allow secure internal communication between the containerized services.

Which hosting solution should you design?

  1. A
    Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
  2. Azure Container AppsAnswer
  3. C
    Azure Functions on a Consumption plan
  4. D
    Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets using Spot VMs

Answer

Azure Container Apps
Azure Container Apps is the ideal hosting solution because it is designed for microservices, supports scaling to zero to eliminate idle costs, provides secure service-to-service communication, and has minimal operational management overhead. Additionally, it has no execution timeout limit that would restrict the 15-minute report generation service.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the hosting requirements for the containerized microservices.
The solution must support four containerized services, allow secure internal communication, scale to zero to minimize idle costs, and run a report generation service that executes for up to 15 minutes.
Establishing the functional and non-functional constraints ensures the selected platform meets all business and technical needs.
2
Evaluate the execution time constraint against the candidate serverless platforms.
Azure Functions on a Consumption plan has a maximum execution timeout of 10 minutes, making it unsuitable for the 15-minute report generation service.
Eliminating options with hard execution limits prevents timeout-related failures in the production system.
3
Evaluate the cost and management overhead constraints.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) introduces high cluster management and operational overhead, and does not natively scale to zero without complex auto-scaling configurations. Spot VMs on Virtual Machine Scale Sets are subject to eviction, making them unsuitable for steady-state production services. Azure Container Apps meets all criteria: it scales to zero, supports long-running containerized workloads, provides secure internal networking, and requires minimal management overhead.
Selecting a managed serverless container service minimizes administrative overhead while optimizing costs during periods of inactivity.

Key Concept

Selecting the appropriate serverless or container hosting platform based on execution time limits, cost requirements, and operational overhead.
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Topics

Serverless and Web Application Hosting

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