ACI vs AKS vs Container Apps: When to Use What

Azure provides three container compute services — Azure Container Instances (ACI), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure Container Apps. Choosing the right one depends on your workload characteristics, team expertise, and operational requirements. This lesson provides a structured decision framework, compares the services across multiple dimensions, and walks through real-world scenarios.

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The Decision Spectrum

Think of the three services as a spectrum from simple to complex:

Simple                                                    Complex
  |                                                          |
  ACI              Container Apps                         AKS
  |                      |                                   |
  Single containers      Microservices                  Full K8s
  Batch jobs             APIs / web apps               Custom operators
  Dev/test               Event-driven                  Multi-team platform
  Short-lived            Scale to zero                 Stateful workloads

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Comparison Matrix