Quick Note — Recommend a Container-Based Solution
AZ-305 › Unit 4: Design infrastructure solutions › Design compute solutions › Recommend a container-based solution
Quick Note — Recommend a Container-Based Solution
A retail platform's CTO walks into a planning meeting with a single slide: "We have 14 microservices and 3 Kubernetes clusters. Two of those clusters run one service each. The third runs everything else. We are paying for 3 control planes, 3 sets of cluster patching, and the platform team is spending half its time on cluster ops, not the product." The architect's question — "did each cluster have to be Kubernetes?" — turned out to be the right one. Two of the clusters became Azure Container Apps environments, and the central one stayed AKS because it ran a stateful workload with a Helm chart from a vendor. Cost dropped 40% and the platform team got their afternoons back.…
Retrieval target
- Recommend a Container-Based Solution
- Closed-book recall
- 5 minutes
- Open the full lesson after a miss
Decision anchors
| Prompt | Compact answer |
|---|---|
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) | Managed Kubernetes. Microsoft runs the control plane for free; you pay for the node pool VMs. Includes integrations: Entra ID for auth, Azure CNI / kubenet for networking, Azure Disk / Files for storage, Azure Monitor Container Insights, Defender for Containers. Pick when you need K8s primitives — operators, CRDs, multiple node pools, advanced networking, GPU pools, fine-grained RBAC. |
Azure Container Instances (ACI) | Single-container sandboxes with per-second billing. No orchestration, no scaling — just 'run this container'. Starts in seconds, mounts Azure Files for state, supports public IP + DNS label. Pick for short-lived burst tasks, dev sandboxes, AKS virtual-node scale-out targets, or as a serverless backend for a queue worker.… |
Azure Container Apps (ACA) | Serverless-style container hosting built on a managed Kubernetes underlay (you don't see K8s). Features: scale to zero, HTTP / event triggers (via KEDA), Dapr sidecar for service-to-service comms, revisions for blue-green deploys, per-app secrets and managed identity. Pick when you want containers without operating AKS — most microservices, async workers, internal APIs. |
Azure Container Registry (ACR) | Managed OCI registry for container images and Helm charts. Three tiers: Basic (entry, single region), Standard (more storage and throughput), Premium (adds geo-replication, content trust, private link, tasks for image build/patch). Entra-authenticated; supports managed identity pull from AKS. The default Microsoft image-distribution backplane. |
Read the answers once, then cover the right-hand column and reconstruct each one from the prompt. A useful answer names the requirement, the recommended control or service boundary, and the nearest alternative it rejects. If you can only recognize the answer after seeing it, retrieval is not yet secure.
Ninety-second explanation
Without notes, explain:
- What requirement signals this learning objective rather than a neighbouring one?
- Which two solution families are most likely to be compared?
- Which hard constraint eliminates the strongest distractor?
- What identity, network, data, or failure boundary must appear in the design?
- Which operational test would prove the recommendation works?
Then compare your explanation with the full lesson. Record the missing decision rule—not merely the missed product name—in your error log.
When to open the full lesson
Open the curriculum-linked lesson when you cannot explain a comparison, when a scenario depends on a numeric limit or SKU feature, or when the service is on a retirement path. Use current Microsoft Learn documentation for availability, limits, pricing, naming, and migration milestones; the quick note is intentionally compact.
Source and freshness
Derived from the linked AZ-305 lesson and retrieval deck, grounded in both attached course sources. Reviewed 2026-08-02. Current Microsoft documentation controls changing product contracts.