ACA stands for Azure Container Apps. Azure Container Apps are a flavor of a hosted Kubernetes services in the Microsoft Azure cloud. ACA is a fully Platform As A Service (PaaS) resource. In the ACA service, Microsoft manages all components of the underlying Kubernetes cluster, including the system nodes (control plane) and the user nodes (nodes for user workloads). The customer manages only the containerized application deployment and focuses on the application development and deployment rather on the underlying Kubernetes cluster internals. ACA runs on top of Azure AKS but does not provide direct access to the underlying (fully managed) AKS cluster components, such as the AKS API server. A basic limitatoin of ACA as of January 2024 is that it does not yet support Windows-based containers.
