# Containers: ACI, Container Apps and AKS — Azure

Source: https://www.skillbyai.com/en/azure/c-containers

> Pick a container platform by how much Kubernetes you want to own.

## Three levels of container control

**Azure Container Instances (ACI)** runs a container or small group on demand, billed per second: good for jobs and quick tasks, no orchestration. **Azure Container Apps** is a serverless container platform built on Kubernetes, KEDA and Envoy, but it hides the cluster: you get HTTPS ingress, revisions with traffic splitting, Dapr integration and event-driven autoscaling, including **scale to zero**. **Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)** is managed Kubernetes: Azure runs the control plane, you run node pools and get the full Kubernetes API, Helm charts and operators, along with the responsibility for upgrades and cluster design. All three pull images from a registry, typically **Azure Container Registry (ACR)**, ideally using a managed identity with the *AcrPull* role rather than admin credentials.

## A container app that scales on HTTP load

One command creates the environment and the app from an image.

```bash
az acr create -g rg-shop-dev-cin -n acrshopdev --sku Basic
az acr build -r acrshopdev -t shop-api:1.0 .

az containerapp up -g rg-shop-dev-cin -n ca-shop-api \
  --image acrshopdev.azurecr.io/shop-api:1.0 \
  --ingress external --target-port 8080

az containerapp update -g rg-shop-dev-cin -n ca-shop-api \
  --min-replicas 0 --max-replicas 10 \
  --scale-rule-name http-rule --scale-rule-type http \
  --scale-rule-http-concurrency 50
```

## Do not reach for AKS by default

AKS is powerful but you inherit Kubernetes upgrades, networking choices and security hardening. If your team needs only HTTP services and background workers, Container Apps or App Service usually ships faster with less operations work.

**Quiz:** A team wants containers with HTTPS ingress, revisions and scale-to-zero, without managing Kubernetes. Which service fits?

- [ ] Azure Kubernetes Service
- [ ] Virtual Machine Scale Sets
- [x] Azure Container Apps
- [ ] Azure Container Registry

*Answer:* Azure Container Apps. Container Apps offers those features as a serverless platform; AKS exposes and requires you to run Kubernetes.