We all aware how the containers helped the technology to evolve to next level and as per our understanding, current rapid growth may not this much quick, they may still get delayed. Part of that so far, we have understood what is docker, how to use with multiple use cases. Along with container, cloud is one getting change day by day and all are enabling very important features to serve the on-demand technologies. As we aware ECS in AWS is one of the most used service in AWS. As like that, Azure is one of the more adopting cloud services across multiple organization now a days. As azure cloud adoption increases, they are enabling all the on-demand services for their customers. Part of that Azure has introduced azure container instance (ACI) some time back. Which is one of key feature, as ACI adoption increasing rapidly with multiple on-demand or short jobs/tasks. Let’s check about Azure container instance and its features.
What are Azure Container Instances
As we know containers are becoming the preferred way to package, deploy, and manage new or latest applications. With that container Instances offers the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure, without having to manage any virtual machines and without having to adopt a higher-level service.
- Azure Container Instances are a one of the solutions for any scenario that can operate in isolated Containers offer significant start-up benefits over virtual machines (VMs).
- Azure Container Instances can start containers in Azure in seconds, without the need to provision and manage VMs. containers, including simple applications, task automation, and build jobs.
Features Of Azure Container Instances
Let’s see the features azure container instances,
- Support for both Linux and Windows containers.
- Ability to launch new containers through the Azure portal or command line interface (CLI) or any preferable automated way like terraform—underlying compute resources are automatically configured and scaled.
- Support for standard Docker images and the use of public container registries, such as Docker Hub, as well as Azure Container Registry.
- Ability to specify the number of CPU cores and memory required for container instances.
- You can configure networking features like assigning a public IP address, add a prefix for its domain name and you can also choose what ports to expose.
- Linux containers are faster to start up because their image sizes are much smaller compared to Windows containers. Windows containers currently have a number of limitations and do not support all the exact same features that Linux containers do but hopefully, that will change soon.
- Azure Container Instances can have a restart policy allowing you to state that what should have happened when the container stopped.
- Azure Container Instances also allow you to mount volumes, where Azure file share is the most common use case. Other than that, you can also mount secret volumes or even git repositories as a volume.
- At the time of creating your container instance, you can optionally specify the command line just like you could its Docker where you can override the default initial command for a container.
- You can specify environment variables for your containers.
- you can also access the logs that the Azure Container Instances emit.
- Defining groups that organize multiple containers that share the same host, storage, and networking resources. This is similar to the concept of a pod in Kubernetes.
Orchestration
When deploying containers at a large scale, it is common to use container orchestrators, like Kubernetes, Nomad and Docker Swarm. These tools help automate and manage the interaction between containers, and concerns like resource provisioning, networking, and storage management. Azure container instances provide some of the basic features of container orchestrators. By design, it is not intended to be a full orchestration platform.
Traditional orchestrators vs. ACI orchestration
A full orchestration platform manages and automates tasks like scheduling containers, managing affinity, monitoring health, enabling failover, auto scaling, networking, service discovery, and application upgrades and rollbacks. ACI uses a layered approach, performing all the management functions needed to run a single container.
On top of these basic capabilities, orchestrators can manage activities related to multiple containers. Because the container instance’s infrastructure is managed by Azure, the orchestrator doesn’t need to worry about finding the right host to run a single container. The elasticity of the cloud ensures hosts are always available. Instead, the orchestrator can focus on simplifying multi-container tasks such as scaling, high availability, and upgrades.
What ACI add advantage
For long-term stable workloads, container scaling on a dedicated virtual machine cluster is usually cheaper than running the same containers on Azure Container Instances. However, container instances provide a good solution for rapid changes in overall capacity to cope with unexpected or short-term usage peaks. For applications that experience sharp fluctuations in demand, you would typically scale up the number of virtual machines in the cluster and then deploy containers on those machines. ACI makes things simpler, by letting the orchestrator deploy new containers directly on Azure Container Instances, and terminate them when no longer needed.
Where you can use Azure container instances?
Here some examples for azure container instances can be used.
- Application development – Continuous integration
- AI.
- Data and analytics.
- Hybrid cloud and infrastructure.
- Load testing and Batch jobs.
- Internet of Things. Connect, monitor, and control devices with secure, scalable, and open edge-to-cloud solutions.
- Security and governance.
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Check how to create the azure container instance on azure portal and access the public IP
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