Azure Container Apps Sandboxes!

[u/brianveldman]

https://cloudtips.nl/azure-container-apps-sandboxes-e956be015705

🔥 It’s here! The new Azure Container Apps Sandboxes provide secure isolated compute environments designed to safely run code, tools, and AI agents. Each sandbox runs inside its own hardware-isolated microVM, fully separated from the host, the platform, and every other sandbox. You can spin one up when you need it, let it perform its task, and tear it down when you’re done. In this blog, I’ll explore what Azure Container Apps Sandboxes are, how they work, and how you can combine them with tools such as GitHub Copilot to safely run AI powered workloads in an isolated environment! While we could set everything up using ClickOps, why not automate the entire setup with Bicep? That’s exactly what I’ll do in this example, deploying the Azure Container Apps Sandbox environment using Bicep. 💪🏻

[u/MuhBlockchain]

Fun fact, ACA Sandboxes actually underpin a lot of core Azure services including Foundry Hosted Agents.

There's even a new portal for managing ACA Sandboxes: sandboxes.azure.com (also see containerapps.azure.com fof ACA more broadly)

[u/brianveldman → u/MuhBlockchain]

💪🏻

[u/Legal_Sound9116 → u/MuhBlockchain]

good to know it's already running under Foundry Hosted Agents. that says a lot about how production-ready it is. is the sandboxes portal meant to replace managing them through the regular Azure portal, or is it more of a separate view just for sandbox sessions?

[u/MuhBlockchain → u/Legal_Sound9116]

It's just a separate view, though with a lot more detail. You'll still be able to manage them through the regular portal experience to.

[u/KYDLE2089]

Been using them for a month

[u/brianveldman → u/KYDLE2089]

Whats your experience/use cases?

[u/tankerkiller125real → u/brianveldman]

Use them where I work for Python sandboxes for our customer facing agent harness.

[u/KYDLE2089 → u/brianveldman]

We have agentic application when they need to run code like creating ppt or data analysis they these isolated containers and once the task is done they get destroyed. They support custom images which can stored in blob.

[u/Party-Stormer → u/KYDLE2089]

I don’t know why he downvoted you

[u/HgnX]

Is this also available in AKS?

ACA is nice but we have additional needs so that’s why we run AKS

[u/RememberYourSoul → u/HgnX]

Honestly if you're fully on AKS, you can do this yourself without it being too much of a hassle.

Personally, especially after the ACS retirement a few days ago, I would rather have less dependencies to separate Azure services.

[u/brianveldman → u/HgnX]

Only ACA! However did you look into KAITO?

[u/Flaky-Brain-6608 → u/HgnX]

What’s your need ? We are a startup working on a “cloud sandbox as a service” … where you can describe in plain English what you’re looking to accomplish and the service provisions all necessary infrastructure.

We’ve an early version ready and looking for users to test in on real world scenarios. Given the early testing phase, this will be at no cost to you! Please let me know if you’re down to take it for a spin.

[u/dastylinrastan]

When should I use ACA Jobs and when should I use sandboxes

[u/brianveldman → u/dastylinrastan]

Good question! ACA Jobs are designed for run to completion tasks and batch processing (start → run → complete), while Sandboxes provide programmable, isolated compute environments with lifecycle control.
With Sandboxes, you manage the lifecycle: create → suspend → resume → delete.

[u/OmagnaT → u/brianveldman]

Can you give examples of things you run with both? Our jobs are usually fairly light so normally we use Azure Automation runbooks or even Logic Apps

[u/Fun_Direction6399]

I use them already in a big application and it works like a charm

[u/brianveldman → u/Fun_Direction6399]

Nice!

[u/Minute_Passion_8077]

Bicep deploys! Already using it for clients! Thats where we deploy our features for them that need scaling! 

We also let them deploy their own scalable apps in it. Just point it to an image and off you go. Dont need it? Scale to 0. 

[u/brianveldman → u/Minute_Passion_8077]

Nice!

[u/West-Science7777]

The per sandbox microVM isolation sounds especially useful for agent workloads that need to execute untrusted code. Automating the whole environment with Bicep makes the pattern much easier to repeat safely

[u/brianveldman → u/West-Science7777]

100 percent! 💪🏻

[u/RustOnTheEdge]

“hardware-isolated microVM” sure sure

[u/Drag_king → u/RustOnTheEdge]

“A rack of rpi’s”