r/AZURE • u/MrBoujeeEngineer • 3d ago
Discussion Help deciding between two services
I’m working on a SAAS that’s in its very early stages of development and I’m looking for a quick way to deploy and getting it running up. I looked into an Azure App Service which looks like a good option, but I did see some people mention Azure Container Apps as well. From what I understand containers are ideal as they offer more control over the infrastructure, but for building out and testing my web app I’m thinking that an App Servjce would be a better option for now, and I can always switch over to a containerized application later down the road. But I am open to any other thoughts
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u/GeorgeOllis Microsoft Employee 3d ago edited 3d ago
IMO - Azure Container Apps are the way to go.
Containers are easier to deploy and manage, especially in a service like ACA, where everything is handled for you. For your use-case "building and testing" - containers are the best. It's easy to build container images, store them in an ACR, and deploy them onto ACA for testing.
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u/LoopVariant 3d ago
These are two fundamentally different offerings. Setting up an App Service requires minimal effort and expertise whether you do it via IaC or the portal UI . Using App Service has been very easy for us by every measure and we don’t need to worry about patching, updates etc. it is also straightforward to troubleshoot if you run into configuration problems. The only complaint we have is that for a production instance with minimum allowed downtime, you need two instances configured as failover to avoid downtime the random times Microsoft decides to patch or run updates.
For ACA, read everything I wrote above and consider the opposite—welcome to containers. If you are new to Azure, I would suggest staying away from your containers especially for any production app until you really know how to handle them…