General availability: Confidential containers on Azure Container Instances (ACI)

Azure Updates

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Published

May 23, 2023

Timeline

  • May 2023
    General Availability

Product

Azure Container Instances

Tag

Features
Microsoft Build

Category

Compute
Containers

Description

Confidential containers on Azure Container Instances (ACI), now generally available, enables you to run containers in a trusted execution environment (TEE) that provides hardware-based confidentiality and integrity protections for your container workloads while in use in memory. 

Confidential containers on ACI is supported as a new SKU that you can select when deploying your workload and will provide you with the following benefits for workloads processing highly sensitive data:   

Ability to lift and shift workloads to a confidential environment without needing to take any dependencies on any confidential computing libraries. 

In-memory encryption of data with a hardware based dedicated key per container group helping to guard against attacks from a malicious OS, or Hypervisor components.  

Support for remote attestation to enable a relying party to verify that a service is running in a TEE before processing any sensitive data. As part of confidential containers on ACI, an agent will validate the authenticity of the hardware and application components which can be verified through a remote attestation service before any sensitive data is released to the TEE. 

To learn more, read the blog announcement and documentation.