General availability: Confidential containers on Azure Container Instances (ACI)
Published date: May 23, 2023
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.