Rapid deployment containers

The very moment when even Flash may envy the developers. Exactly a week ago, we had a cool announcement about the new Azure Container instances service (Azure Container Instances, ACI), which makes the deployment of containers as easy as possible. This is the world's first cloud service of this kind. Below I want to tell you in more detail what she is and how to work with her.

A series of articles "We are talking about containers":

1. Containers for rapid deployment .
2. DevOps with Kubernetes and VSTS. Part 1: Local history.
3. DevOps with Kubernetes and VSTS. Part 2: Cloud history.
4. A node with infinite capacity for Kubernetes.

It allows you to quickly and effortlessly create containers, while eliminating the need to manage the infrastructure of virtual machines. ACI is the fastest and easiest way to deploy containers in the cloud.
')
The container instance in Azure is a separate container with per-second billing that runs almost instantly. ACI has flexible controls on the resources allocated to containers (memory and virtual processors), with which you can create the best infrastructure for your application. Now you really only pay for the resources actually used, every second and every gigabyte is taken into account . Containers in ACI - are integrated in the Azure platform in a maximal way. This allows you to use role-based access control (RBAC) and billing tags to account for resource consumption at the individual container level. The service provides access to the containers directly, so you do not have to think about managing the VM or learn the concepts of orchestration of top-level clusters. It's simple: your code runs in a container deployed in the cloud.

If you are just starting to get acquainted with cloud containers, Azure Container Instances can be a convenient tool for you. To create and deploy a new container, just configure a few parameters. For example, using the following CLI command, you can deploy containers in the ACI service through the Azure Cloud Shell . For detailed instructions, see the quick start guide for ACI .

az container create -g aci_grp --name nginx --image library/nginx --ip-address public 

And if you need to specify the amount of memory (GB) and the number of processors, the command will look like this:

 az container create -g aci_grp --name nginx --image library/nginx --ip-address public –cpu 2 --memory 5 

A preliminary version with support for Linux containers is currently available. In the coming weeks, Windows container support will be implemented. For deployment, use the Azure CLI command line interface or template. In addition, you can quickly and easily deploy a container using the Docker Hub public repository or your private repository using the Azure Container Registry. Each deployed container is completely isolated from the resources of other clients.

As you have already seen, working with ACI is very simple. Azure Container Instances does not act as an orchestrator, rather it is one of the components of container infrastructure that should be used in conjunction with orchestrators and other services.

Today we also announce the availability of the open source ACI Connector for Kubernetes . It is designed to deploy containers for the Kubernetes cluster in Azure Container Instances. This approach allows you to almost instantly allocate the necessary resources to the cluster, eliminating the administrator from having to manage the VM infrastructure while continuing to use the universal Kubernetes API. In a single K8s cluster, you can use both virtual machines and container instances. Azure Container Instances can help you cope effectively with the sudden increase in load, and virtual machines will allow for more predictable scaling. Moreover, workloads can be easily transferred between these basic infrastructures based on different models. This approach provides high flexibility in deploying Kubernetes. Services can be started in seconds, without creating pre-virtual machines. Per second billing is applied for accounting of resources consumed and scaling .

Demonstration of the ACI Connector in action:



We are constantly increasing investments and actively engaging the community in the work on supporting containers and Kubernetes, including Helm, Draft , as well as the k8s ACI connector, which I described above. Community support emphasizes the importance of an open ecosystem in terms of the development of container technology that is gaining momentum. This experience is really encouraging.

Therefore, I am pleased to announce that Microsoft has joined the organization Cloud Native Computing (CNC) as a platinum member . CNCF is a Linux Foundation collaboration project (Microsoft joined this organization last year), whose members oversee projects Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, containerd, Helm, gRPC, and many others. We are very excited about the possibility of working closely with the CNCF community. Gabe Monroy, lead container manager at Microsoft Azure, has joined the CNCF board.

I suggest you try out new services and look forward to your feedback and suggestions. Your developments based on our technologies are always very inspiring!

Based on a recent announcement from Cory Sanders .