ACI

Azure Container Instances provides an easy means of running containers on Azure without having to deploy and maintain complex infrastructure. The service uses a "pay as you go" model, charged at a set rate per vCPU and GB of RAM per second. They support both Windows and Linux containers.

They can be attached to public IP addresses and have a DNS name applied to them for quick and dirty access.

Costs are high compared to VMs, so the service is best suited to provide elasticity to handle overflow traffic, scale background jobs or for scratch or load testing environments.

Restart policy

Restart policies allow controlling the behaviour of the container group when the leading container exits:

  • Always
  • OnFailure
  • Never

Container groups

Contain multiple containers, analogous to Kubernetes pods.

Kubernetes

A virtual Kubelet implementation allows treating ACI as an infinitely scalable node, and can provide overflow for resource-constrained Kubernetes clusters.


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