News

Microsoft Launches Low-Maintenance Azure Container Service

• By Kurt Mackie
• April 27, 2018

A new service from Microsoft that lets users easily spin up containers on its public datacenter infrastructure is now production-ready.

The Azure Container Instances service is currently available in six regions throughout the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia. Initial container creation is free of charge under a new pricing structure that will take effect on July 1, 2018.

Microsoft offers a 99.9 percent service-level agreement with regard to the service's uptime.

Azure Container Instances lets developers add containers without having to worry about creating and maintaining virtual machines on Azure infrastructure. Containers are an operating system virtualization approach that makes it easier for developers to host applications without conflict. Microsoft also has an Azure Container Service for hosting containers, but it does require setting up virtual machines to use it.

The decision to use one service over the other -- Azure Container Instances versus Azure Container Service -- depends on how much isolation is required for containers, according to an explanation last year by Corey Sanders, corporate vice president of Azure, when the service first previewed.

However, in this week's GA announcement, Sanders indicated that Azure Container Instances has a "deep security model, protecting each individual container at a hypervisor level which provides a strong security boundary for multitenant scenarios."

Organizations that need a "complete orchestration solution" can use Microsoft's AKS offering, which is still at preview. AKS was originally described as "managed Kubernetes on Azure," a service that adds automatic upgrades and a simpler user experience for organizations using Google's Kubernetes container management solution for clusters. AKS confusingly is just the Azure Container Service with support for Kubernetes, but Microsoft insists on using the "AKS" abbreviation for it.

Using Azure Container Instances removes maintenance burdens for organizations, which is unique, according to Sanders:

It can sometimes be a challenge to secure multitenant workloads running inside containers on the same virtual machine. Enabling this isolation without requiring you to create a hosting cluster is unique from other clouds and is a true cloud native model.

The Azure Container Instances service includes automatic scaling for containers, which can be deployed "in seconds." It takes just a "single command" to deploy them, according to the pricing page.

Use-case scenarios for Azure Container Instances include "batch processing, continuous integration and event-driven computing," according to Sanders. It's also used by some of Microsoft's "largest customers" for data processing using the Azure Blob Storage service, he added.

Later this year, Microsoft is planning to add VNet integration to Azure Container Instances, Sanders indicated.

Sanders also provided some updates on related technologies. For instance, he indicated that the Virtual Kubelet open source project that Microsoft had announced at KubeCon last December now has "multiple providers, including VMware, AWS and Hyper.sh." The Virtual Kubelet is an open source alternative to Microsoft's Azure Container Instances Connector for Kubernetes solution.

"With Virtual Kubelet support, ACI also realizes the vision of a 'serverless Kubernetes,'" Sanders stated.

He added that the Azure Portal's display of logs and events for containers has been improved. Microsoft included an execute command in containers "to launch an interactive shell." It's possible to "stream container logs with Azure CLI 2.0." An option was added to have a container "always restart, restart only on failure or never restart," Sanders indicated.