Why Azure Container Instances ?

In this post i will share with you most of the reasons for choosing Azure Container Instances to deploy your application. Before we start let’s discover what is Azure Container Instances.

Azure Container Instances is a service that enables a developers to deploy containers on the Microsoft Azure public cloud without having to provision or manage any underlying infrastructure.

Pricing

One of the major reason to choose Azure Container Instances is the pricing; ACI is a per second Billings services as shown in the table Bellow a linux container with 1GB RAM and 1vCPU full used will cost you only $38.81 per month

From https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/container-instances/

This cost is the most minimal compared to AKS and Virtual Machines; one other thing is that ACI’s SKU is based on your application needs, while in other cases you have chosen one of the SKUs published by Microsoft that is not always profitable.

Requirement

The only prerequisite you need to publish your application to Azure Container Instances is a Container Registry, whether you already have a private registry that you can use or you can build an Azure Container Registry: a private Docker Registry in Azure where you can control your Docker Container Images and artifacts.

Management

Azure Container service as PaaS services, this will give you the ability's to concentrate more in your application because you will not have to maintain any infrastructure.

Provisioning & Deployment

Azure Container Instance is one of the most easier service in the provisioning and deployment because there's different mode of provisioning & deployment. the faster one is using Azure portal as shown in the documentation.

And of course as all azure services Azure Container instance can be provisioning using Powershell and ARM Template.

As well as we can deploy our Azure container Instances from Azure DevOps pipelines you can follow my next blog post Azure Container instances and DevOps.

Types & Performance

When we are talking about container first we get in our mind which system the container is running linux/ windows, for that reason Azure container instance is available on both linux and windows operating system. And Linux containers support GPU which will allow you to run workloads with intensive compute and we don’t forget the CPUs and RAMs for each container one of the most amazing things is there's no SKU for ACI you can choose the CPUs and RAMs based on the exact needs of your application.

Security & Networking

Azure Container Instance is like VMs can be protected with Azure virtual network and it’s recommended to monitor and log the configuration and traffic of virtual networks, subnets… and one of the most important ways secure your applications is to use a private registry such as Azure Registry to protect your images.