Microsoft ACA updates 2024 - Q4

Within this blog, I want to give an overview of all the feature in Q4 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] .NET 9 support
  As of November 12, 2024, NET 9 is now generally available for download. Azure PaaS services, including Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, and more, now fully support .NET 9. Customers can now leverage the enhanced capabilities of .NET 9, such as significant performance improvements, adaptive garbage collection, and support for ARM64 optimizations, to build and deploy cloud-native and AI-powered applications more efficiently. They can also take advantage of seamless integration with Azure services to scale and manage their .NET 9 applications with improved observability and reduced cloud costs. Click here to learn more.
  
• [General available] Dynamic sessions in Azure Container Apps
  The dynamic sessions in Azure Container Apps is a fast, sandboxed, ephemeral compute, suitable for running AI-generated, untrusted code at scale in hostile multi-tenancy scenarios. Each session has full compute isolation using Hyper-V. There are two modes:
  
  • Code interpreter sessions:. You can run Python code using preinstalled popular Python packages. More languages and runtimes are planned in the future.
    To build AI agents or copilots, large language models (LLMs) are paired with a code interpreter. A code interpreter enables an agent or copilot application to extend an LLM’s abilities to perform complex tasks such as solving mathematical and reasoning problems, analyzing data, and generating graphics and charts. You can build your own copilots by adding code interpreter sessions to popular frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Semantic Kernel in just few lines of code.
    
  • Custom container sessions: You can use a custom container to create a code interpreter for your specific needs, such as preinstalling dependencies or supporting a different language. You can also build a custom container to run any application that requires secure sandboxed environments (like web-based code editing sandbox, SaaS application that can be extended by end users with custom code snippets, or hosted Jupyter Notebook service). Click here to learn more.
    

Features that are currently in Public Preview and not yet GA

• [Public Preview] Private endpoint support in Azure Container Apps for workload profiles environments
  Private endpoints are now supported in public preview for workload profile environments in Azure Container Apps. This enables customers to connect to their Container Apps environment using a private IP address in their Azure Virtual Network, eliminating exposure to the public internet and securing access to their applications. With private endpoints, customers can also connect directly from Azure Front Door to their workload profile environments over a private link instead of the public internet. Today, customers can enable Private Link to container apps origin for Azure Front Door through CLI with portal support coming soon. This feature is supported for both Consumption and Dedicated plans in workload profile environments. Private endpoints are supported for both new and existing environments, so that customers can leverage the new capabilities without re-provisioning their environment. This new capability also introduces the public network access setting, enabling customers to configure Azure networking policies. Private endpoints will be free during public preview, but this is subject to change upon GA. Currently, private endpoints are only supported for public cloud. To learn more, click here.
• [Public Preview] Serverless GPU's in Azure Container Apps
  Azure Container Apps now support Serverless GPUs in public preview. Serverless GPUs enable you to seamlessly run your AI workloads on-demand with automatic scaling, optimized cold start, per-second billing with scale down to zero when not in use, and reduced operational overhead to support easy real-time custom model inferencing and other machine learning tasks. Serverless GPUs accelerate the speed of your AI development team by allowing you to focus on your core AI code and Azure Container Apps now supports Serverless GPUs in public preview. Serverless GPUs enable you to seamlessly run your AI workloads with automatic scaling, optimized cold start, per-second billing with scale down to zero when not in use, and reduced operational overhead to support easy, real-time custom model inferencing and other machine learning tasks. Serverless GPUs less on managing infrastructure when using GPUs. They provide an excellent middle layer option between Azure AI Model Catalog's serverless APIs and hosting models on managed compute. It provides full data governance as your data never leaves the boundaries of your container while still providing a managed, serverless platform from which to build your applications. At public preview launch, serverless GPUs powered by NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA T4 GPUs, will be supported in limited regions. For the most up-to-date pricing and region availability for Serverless GPUs in Azure Container Apps, checkout the pricing page. To learn more, click here.
• [Public Preview] Planned maintenance in Azure Container Apps
  Azure Container Apps now offers planned maintenance in public preview. This feature allows you to control when non-critical updates are applied to your Container Apps environment to minimize downtime and impact to applications. Non-critical updates include minor security patches, bug fixes, and new releases. Critical and urgent updates, however, are applied as needed to ensure security and reliability compliance, even outside of planned maintenance windows. To configure a weekly maintenance window, you simply need to specify a day of week, a start time in the UTC time zone, and a duration. Planned maintenance will be free during public preview, but this is subject to change upon GA.
  To learn more, click here.

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.