AZ-104 Practice Question 26: Container Apps Versus ACI
Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) · Test 3 · question 6 of 10
A team has containerised an HTTP API. They want a hosting option that scales out with HTTP request volume, scales to zero when nobody is calling it overnight, and can run two revisions side by side so a percentage of traffic goes to the new build before full release, with no Kubernetes cluster for them to operate.
Which Azure service should you recommend?
Show answer and explanation
Answer:
Azure Container Apps "is a serverless platform for running containerized applications without managing the underlying infrastructure," and it meets each requirement directly. Applications "dynamically scale based on ... HTTP traffic," you can "autoscale your apps based on any KEDA-supported scale trigger" where "most applications can scale to zero", and you can "run multiple container revisions" and "split traffic across multiple versions of an application for Blue/Green deployments and A/B testing scenarios."
Option B is the right service for a different shape of work. ACI "offers the fastest and simplest way to run Linux or Windows containers in Azure" for isolated, task-based, or burst workloads, but a container group is a fixed allocation of CPU and memory; there is no HTTP-driven autoscaling, scale-to-zero, revision model, or traffic splitting.
Option C would satisfy the functional requirements and fails the operational one. AKS is a higher-level orchestrator that the team would have to run: node pools, upgrades, and cluster configuration are their responsibility.
Option D is the most work for the least benefit. Scale sets scale on VM metrics or a schedule, not on HTTP requests; they do not scale to zero while serving; and blue-green would have to be built by hand with a load balancer and two scale sets.
Reference: Azure Container Apps overview