Exploring Azure Container Instances

Azure Container Instances (ACI) is a fully managed container hosting service in Azure. While ACI provides some of the basic capabilities of container orchestrators, it should not be considered a lightweight container orchestrator. Rather, ACI can be used to complement the use of container orchestrators in the cloud. For example, virtual notes in Azure Kubernetes Service use ACI for fast, on-demand capacity. ACI comes with a full set of features and interfaces native to Azure capabilities. Applications hosted in ACI cannot be deployed to Azure Virtual Networks and integrated with on-premises networks using a side-to-side VPN.

ACI is more flexible in the deployment footprint than deploying applications to VMs directly. While Azure VMs require you to pick from a list of predetermined sizes, ACI lets you freely choose the CPU count and memory allocation for your application. ACI even supports direct integration with the SMB file share service of Azure...