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Difficulty: MediumServerless and Web Application Hosting

A logistics company is designing an event-driven processing workflow for shipping manifests uploaded to Azure Blob Storage. Each manifest triggers a processing task that parses the file, cross-references international customs databases, and generates a compliance report. The task takes approximately 12 minutes to complete and runs sporadically throughout the day. You need to recommend a serverless compute option that supports this execution duration while minimizing costs by scaling to zero instances when no manifests are being processed. Which solution should you recommend?

  1. An Azure Container Apps jobAnswer
  2. B
    An Azure Function hosted on a Consumption plan
  3. C
    An Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster using virtual nodes
  4. D
    An Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set utilizing Spot virtual machines

Answer

An Azure Container Apps job
The correct answer is the option specifying an Azure Container Apps job. This service is designed for run-to-completion, event-driven tasks that can execute for hours. It scales down to zero instances when idle, ensuring that costs are minimized, while avoiding the operational overhead associated with managing a full Kubernetes cluster.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the execution duration against the limits of Consumption-based serverless options.
The task requires 12 minutes of processing, which exceeds the 10-minute maximum execution timeout limit of Azure Functions on a Consumption plan.
This rules out standard Consumption-based Azure Functions as they would terminate the execution before completion.
2
Evaluate the scaling and operational overhead requirements.
The solution must scale to zero when idle to minimize costs, and it should minimize administrative overhead.
This rules out dedicated App Service plans or virtual machine-based solutions that incur continuous idle costs, and rules out complex orchestrators like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) which add administrative complexity.
3
Select the serverless compute resource designed for run-to-completion containerized tasks.
Azure Container Apps jobs are identified as the best fit because they support event-driven triggers, run-to-completion execution for hours, and scale to zero when idle.
This provides a low-overhead, serverless environment matching all constraints.

Key Concept

Selecting serverless compute services based on execution duration limits, operational overhead, and scale-to-zero requirements.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Serverless and Web Application Hosting

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