I'm looking to migrate our applications from the App Service Plan to Azure Container Apps (ACA). We currently host several apps, including our main backend and continuous web jobs, under a single service plan that costs around $1,200 a month. A lot of that cost comes from our staging environments, which ideally should be off, but the problem is that web jobs need to keep an app always running. Has anyone successfully made this transition? What were the experiences like, particularly concerning cost comparison? I'd love to hear about some real-world numbers!
2 Answers
I’ve moved quite a few projects from App Service to Container Apps, and you will need to rewrite your web jobs. Instead of using the web jobs SDK, you'll create standard console apps that run as hosted services. If your web job has event triggers, KEDA is a fantastic tool to consider; it's way better than Azure Functions in many cases! You'll thank yourself later for ditching the web jobs SDK—it’s quite clunky.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by rewriting web jobs into console apps? Mine are already console apps triggered by command line arguments. How do I incorporate hosted services? Is this mainly for continuous jobs?
I recently migrated my code to ACA using Bicep, and it was great! First, I exported the App Service configuration and then set it all up in ACA, which saved me about 40% in costs. If you're thinking about moving, make sure to check out the official docs for a straightforward guide on using container apps. It made the whole process a lot easier!
Thanks for the tip! We're actually starting fresh since our setup was a bit of a mess. We're transitioning to Bicep and organizing everything into separate resource groups. Hoping to get all our services under ACA, as the App Service feels bloated now.
That’s good to know! Our web job uses the web jobs SDK, and we rely on a service bus queue trigger. I’ve heard KEDA doesn’t handle session count scaling, but we found some custom metrics to work around that. We’re definitely leaning towards moving everything to ACA since App Service hasn’t been ideal for us.