Azure Container App
Does ZopNight manage Azure Container App?
Azure Container Apps meter allocated vCPU-seconds and memory, so an app with minimum replicas above 0 bills continuously even with no traffic. ZopNight watches replica and request activity over a 60-day lookback and uses the Container Apps stop operation to deactivate every replica of non-production apps overnight.
Rules that fire on Azure Container App
At a glance
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Scheduling notes | stopped and started via the Container Apps stop/start operation, deactivating all replicas while stopped. |
Azure Container Apps run microservices and containerized apps on serverless Kubernetes-based infrastructure, billed by allocated vCPU-seconds and memory. Apps with minimum replicas above zero bill continuously.
vCPU-seconds and the minimum-replica floor
Container Apps charge for the vCPU-seconds and memory their replicas hold while allocated. The serverless promise of paying only when requests arrive is real, but only for apps allowed to scale to zero. Setting minimum replicas to 1 or higher installs a floor under the meter: those replicas hold their allocation every second of every day, traffic or none. Cold-start avoidance is the usual justification, and for a production API it can be the right call; for a staging environment it converts a scale-to-zero platform back into an always-on one.
Stop means zero replicas, config intact
For scheduled savings, ZopNight uses the Container Apps stop operation, which deactivates all replicas of the app while stopped, including any minimum-replica floor, and the matching start operation to bring them back. Revisions, scale rules, secrets, and ingress settings all persist; only the running replicas, and therefore the allocation charges, go away. This is the clean overnight verb for non-production apps whose minimum replicas exist for daytime convenience.
Container Apps telemetry ZopNight collects
Each app is discovered through Azure Resource Graph with its replica and scale configuration. Request and replica activity comes from a 60-day Azure Monitor lookback, Cost Management ties spend to the app, and ML auto-tagging covers this type, predicting environment tags that route dev and staging apps onto schedules automatically.
Always-on replicas nobody asked for
Recurring leaks: min-replica floors copied from a production template into every environment; internal tools kept warm around the clock for a team in one timezone; and abandoned apps whose single idle replica has billed vCPU-seconds since the sprint that created them ended.
Container Apps in the portal
Azure portal → Container Apps → select the app. The Overview shows running status, and Application → Scale shows the min and max replica bounds; the min value is the number to interrogate.