Question

Difficulty: MediumServerless and Web Application Hosting

An organization is designing an event-driven system to process data files uploaded to Azure Blob Storage. The file sizes range from 1010 MB to 500500 MB, and the processing time for a single file can take up to 1515 minutes to complete. The system must process files as they are uploaded, scale down to zero instances when no files are present to minimize costs, and require the lowest possible administrative overhead. Which Azure compute solution should you recommend?

  1. A
    Azure Functions on a Consumption plan
  2. Azure Container Apps JobsAnswer
  3. C
    Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
  4. D
    Azure Spot Virtual Machines in a scale set

Answer

Azure Container Apps Jobs
Azure Container Apps Jobs are optimized for run-to-completion event-driven tasks, can scale down to zero when there are no jobs to process, support execution times longer than 1010 minutes, and are fully managed, ensuring low administrative overhead.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the execution duration constraints.
The file processing workload can take up to 1515 minutes.
This rules out basic Azure Functions Consumption plans which enforce a hard maximum timeout of 1010 minutes.
2
Evaluate the scaling and billing constraints.
The solution must support scaling down to zero when idle.
This ensures no billing charges are incurred when no files are being uploaded, eliminating always-on hosting models.
3
Evaluate operational overhead.
The organization needs the lowest possible administrative overhead.
This favors serverless platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings like Azure Container Apps over fully managed Kubernetes services (AKS) or Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

Key Concept

Selecting serverless hosting options based on execution limits, scale-to-zero capability, and administrative overhead.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
Rate this question