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Securing a custom VNET in Azure Container Apps with Network Security Groups

  • Article

Network Security Groups (NSGs) needed to configure virtual networks closely resemble the settings required by Kubernetes.

You can lock down a network via NSGs with more restrictive rules than the default NSG rules to control all inbound and outbound traffic for the Container Apps environment at the subscription level.

In the workload profiles environment, user-defined routes (UDRs) and securing outbound traffic with a firewall are supported. When using an external workload profiles environment, inbound traffic to Azure Container Apps is routed through the public IP that exists in the managed resource group rather than through your subnet. This means that locking down inbound traffic via NSG or Firewall on an external workload profiles environment isn't supported. For more information, see Networking in Azure Container Apps environments.

In the Consumption only environment, custom user-defined routes (UDRs). In the Consumption only environment, express routes are not supported, and custom user-defined routes (UDRs) have limited support. For more details on what level of UDR support is available on Consumption only environment, see the FAQ.

NSG allow rules

The following tables describe how to configure a collection of NSG allow rules. The specific rules required depend on your environment type.

Inbound

Note

When using workload profiles, inbound NSG rules only apply for traffic going through your virtual network. If your container apps are set to accept traffic from the public internet, incoming traffic goes through the public endpoint instead of the virtual network.

Protocol Source Source ports Destination Destination ports Description
TCP Your client IPs * Your container app's subnet1 80, 31080 Allow your Client IPs to access Azure Container Apps when using HTTP. 31080 is the port on which the Container Apps Environment Edge Proxy responds to the HTTP traffic. It is behind the internal load balancer.
TCP Your client IPs * Your container app's subnet1 443, 31443 Allow your Client IPs to access Azure Container Apps when using HTTPS. 31443 is the port on which the Container Apps Environment Edge Proxy responds to the HTTPS traffic. It is behind the internal load balancer.
TCP AzureLoadBalancer * Your container app's subnet 30000-327672 Allow Azure Load Balancer to probe backend pools.

1 This address is passed as a parameter when you create an environment. For example, 10.0.0.0/21.
2 The full range is required when creating your Azure Container Apps as a port within the range will by dynamically allocated. Once created, the required ports are two immutable, static values, and you can update your NSG rules.

Outbound

Protocol Source Source ports Destination Destination ports Description
TCP Your container app's subnet * MicrosoftContainerRegistry 443 This is the service tag for Microsoft container registry for system containers.
TCP Your container app's subnet * AzureFrontDoor.FirstParty 443 This is a dependency of the MicrosoftContainerRegistry service tag.
Any Your container app's subnet * Your container app's subnet * Allow communication between IPs in your container app's subnet.
TCP Your container app's subnet * AzureActiveDirectory 443 If you're using managed identity, this is required.
TCP Your container app's subnet * AzureMonitor 443 Only required when using Azure Monitor. Allows outbound calls to Azure Monitor.
TCP and UDP Your container app's subnet * 168.63.129.16 53 Enables the environment to use Azure DNS to resolve the hostname.
TCP Your container app's subnet1 * Your Container Registry Your container registry's port This is required to communicate with your container registry. For example, when using ACR, you need AzureContainerRegistry and AzureActiveDirectory for the destination, and the port will be your container registry's port unless using private endpoints.2
TCP Your container app's subnet * Storage.<Region> 443 Only required when using Azure Container Registry to host your images.

1 This address is passed as a parameter when you create an environment. For example, 10.0.0.0/21.
2 If you're using Azure Container Registry (ACR) with NSGs configured on your virtual network, create a private endpoint on your ACR to allow Azure Container Apps to pull images through the virtual network. You don't need to add an NSG rule for ACR when configured with private endpoints.

Considerations

  • If you're running HTTP servers, you might need to add ports 80 and 443.
  • Don't explicitly deny the Azure DNS address 168.63.129.16 in the outgoing NSG rules, or your Container Apps environment won't be able to function.