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Difficulty: MediumContainer-Based Workloads

A retail company is designing an order processing system that runs containerized workloads. The system must process orders from an Azure Service Bus queue. The workload has the following requirements:
- Process batches of orders that can take up to 15 minutes to complete per batch.
- Scale dynamically from zero to hundreds of instances based on the volume of messages in the queue.
- Support Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) natively.
- Minimize the administrative and operational effort required to manage infrastructure, VM patching, and container orchestration.

Which Azure service should you recommend hosting the containerized order processing workload?

  1. A
    Azure Container Instances (ACI)
  2. Azure Container AppsAnswer
  3. C
    Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
  4. D
    Azure Functions on a Consumption plan

Answer

Azure Container Apps
Azure Container Apps is a serverless container platform that natively integrates with KEDA (Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling). It allows containers to scale dynamically based on Azure Service Bus queue metrics, including scaling down to zero instances when no messages are present. It abstracts away the Kubernetes cluster management, node patching, and infrastructure maintenance, thereby minimizing operational overhead. Additionally, Azure Container Apps supports long-running execution limits that accommodate the 15-minute processing window.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the scaling and execution requirements
The application runs in containers, needs to scale from zero to hundreds based on queue metrics using KEDA, and has a processing runtime limit of 15 minutes.
This establishes the technical constraints for hosting candidate options.
2
Evaluate the administrative overhead constraint
Azure Kubernetes Service is eliminated due to its high management overhead for node maintenance, upgrades, and clustering.
The scenario explicitly requests minimizing administrative and operational effort.
3
Evaluate the execution timeout constraint
Azure Functions on a Consumption plan is eliminated because it enforces a hard 10-minute timeout.
The workload requires up to 15 minutes of execution time per batch.
4
Evaluate native scaling support
Azure Container Instances is eliminated as it lacks native KEDA event-driven scaling to zero.
ACI would require custom scripts or helper utilities to monitor the queue and trigger instances.
5
Determine the best fit
Azure Container Apps provides serverless container management, native KEDA integrations, scale-to-zero capabilities, and supports container runtime limits that accommodate the 15-minute window.
Azure Container Apps meets all criteria with the lowest administrative overhead.

Key Concept

Selecting the appropriate Azure container hosting service based on scaling requirements, timeout constraints, and operational overhead.
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Topics

Container-Based Workloads

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