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Difficulty: MediumServerless and Web Application Hosting

An organization is designing a serverless solution for a new application that processes user-uploaded medical images. The solution contains two workloads:

1. An API frontend that receives image upload events and metadata. This API experiences highly volatile traffic patterns with long periods of idle time and must scale to zero to minimize hosting costs.
2. A background worker that performs computational analysis on the uploaded images. Each analysis task takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.

You need to select the compute resources that minimize operational overhead and hosting costs while ensuring that all processing tasks complete successfully.

Which two Azure hosting options should you recommend? (Select two.)

  1. Azure Functions on a Consumption plan to host the API frontendAnswer
  2. Azure Container Apps Jobs to run the background workerAnswer
  3. C
    Azure Functions on a Consumption plan to host the background worker
  4. D
    An Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster to host both the API frontend and the background worker

Answer

Azure Functions on a Consumption plan to host the API frontend, and Azure Container Apps Jobs to run the background worker
Azure Functions on a Consumption plan is ideal for the API frontend because it scales dynamically to zero during idle periods, handles volatile traffic efficiently, and minimizes hosting costs. Azure Container Apps Jobs are suitable for the background worker because they can execute tasks that run for longer than 10 minutes (such as the 15-minute image analysis) while scaling to zero when no jobs are active, thus minimizing cost and administrative overhead.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the API frontend requirements.
The API frontend has highly volatile traffic, must scale to zero to minimize costs during idle periods, and processes lightweight requests (HTTP trigger). Azure Functions on a Consumption plan matches these needs perfectly and minimizes management overhead.
Understanding workload patterns helps identify the most cost-effective scaling model.
2
Analyze the background worker requirements and execution duration constraints.
The worker processes computational tasks taking 15 minutes. Azure Functions Consumption plan has a 10-minute maximum timeout limit and is unsuitable. Azure Container Apps Jobs allow containerized tasks to run to completion without strict execution duration limits and support event-driven scaling to zero.
Evaluating runtime duration limits prevents application failure due to platform timeouts.
3
Evaluate operational overhead and complexity constraints.
Using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) would introduce excessive administrative overhead, setup complexity, and ongoing maintenance duties, which fails the requirement to minimize operational overhead.
Comparing management overhead ensures the simplest serverless solution is chosen.

Key Concept

Selecting appropriate serverless hosting options based on execution limits, scaling needs, and operational overhead.
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Topics

Serverless and Web Application Hosting

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