Microsoft ACA updates 2024 - Q3

Within this blog, I want to give an overview of all the feature in Q3 2024 that becomes available in General Availability, Technical Preview or End of Support by Microsoft. This information can be found at Microsoft Azure Updates.

Features that are now supported by Microsoft (GA):

• [General available] Java on Azure Container Apps
  You can now leverage managed Java components for seamless app-to-app communication. Enhance your monitor and diagnostic experience with managed Spring Boot Admin, dynamic logger, and embedded Java metrics in Azure Monitor. Click here to learn more.
  
• [General available] Azure Container Apps support for peer-to-peer encryption
  Azure Container Apps support for environment level peer-to-peer Transport Level Security (TLS) encryption is now generally available. By enabling the peer-to-peer encryption feature, all network traffic within the environment will be TLS encrypted with a private certificate that is valid within the Azure Container Apps environment scope. These certificates are automatically managed by Azure Container Apps. Click here to learn more.
  
• [General available] Support for Azure Key Vault certificates in Azure Container Apps
  Support for Key Vault certificates in Azure container Apps is now generally available. You can now use Azure Key Vault to store and manage your own TLS/SSL certificates for Azure Container Apps at the environment level. You can do so using the Azure portal as well as the Azure CLI. This follows security best practices by leveraging managed identities and simplifies management tasks like auto-rotation. Click here to learn more.
  

Features that are currently in Public Preview and not yet GA

• [Public Preview] Azure Container Storage enabled by Azure Arc Edge Volumes
  We are excited to announce the Public Preview of Azure Container Storage enabled by Azure Arc Edge Volumes, a versatile new addition to our Azure storage solutions designed to enhance data handling at the edge. Edge Volumes offers two key capabilities: Local Shared Volume and Cloud Ingest Volume. The Local Shared Volume provides high-availability, failover-capable storage that remains online and accessible despite lack of network connectivity to cloud infrastructure, ideal for persistent scratch space, temporary storage, and local application-state data. The Cloud Ingest Volume facilitates application-transparent limitless data ingestion of file data from edge to Blob storage, including ADLSgen2 and OneLake. The ingest storage capacity is user-defined to ensure continuous space availability during disconnection, and later purging local copies after confirmed uploads to blob. Both solutions build upon foundational data integrity capabilities to support data integrity in disconnected environments, while optimizing local resource utilization which is ideal for IoT applications. Using Edge Volumes, you can write to a local file system using standard file I/O APIs, and benefit from simplifying your application codebase. We invite you to explore these capabilities in this Public Preview and experience the benefits of advanced edge storage solutions firsthand. To learn more, click here to see the documentation or here to read the blog.
• [Public Preview] Managed Java component (Admin for Spring) in Azure Container Apps
  You can use managed Java components to access platform features for your apps that you would otherwise have to manage yourself. Azure Container Apps now offers managed Admin for Spring to monitor and configure Spring Boot web applications. This component is based on the Spring Boot Admin community project and currently available in public preview. To learn more, click here.
• [Public Preview] Managed identity support for scaling rules in Azure Container Apps
  You can now use managed identities in your scale rules to authenticate with supported Azure services. This can be done using the Azure CLI or Azure Resource Manager (ARM.) We recommend using managed identity whenever possible to avoid storing secrets within the app. To learn more, click here.
• [Public Preview] Azure Container Apps available in Azure Government Cloud Virginia
  Azure Container Apps, a managed serverless container service, is now available in Azure Government Cloud. Azure Container Apps offers an ideal platform for application developers who want to run apps and microservices in containers without managing infrastructure. Azure Container Apps is built on a foundation of powerful open-source technology including Kubernetes, KEDA, Dapr, and Envoy. To learn more, click here or check the getting started guide.

Features that are retired

• [Retired] - None

For more information about the features that are coming out, please refer to the public roadmap of Microsoft ACA team.