back to article Microsoft previews Azure Container Instances – with per-second billing

Microsoft has released a preview of Azure Container Instances, a new way to deploy containers which emphasises speed and ease of use above scalability and orchestration. A web application running in an Azure Container Instance A web application running in an Azure Container Instance The company already offers an Azure …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Will it still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google

    Wonder if it'll still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google, with restrictions on the number of VHDs (Azure's data format) per underlying VM.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Will it still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google

      *whoosh*

      Point going over your head. You will never see the underlying VM - that's the point

    2. TheVogon

      Re: Will it still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google

      They must be doing something right. Microsoft just overtook AWS in yearly cloud revenue run rate @ $15 billion and are growing MUCH faster....

    3. TheVogon

      Re: Will it still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google

      " with restrictions on the number of VHDs (Azure's data format) per underlying VM."

      That's to force you to size your desired storage and IO performance correctly versus the target VM type. Usually you can attach double the number of CPU cores # disks.

      As the largest VM can handle over 260TB per VM across 65 disks delivering ~ 500K IOPS I really don't think it's a limiting factor for most use cases...

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Will it still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google

      "with restrictions on the number of VHDs (Azure's data format) per underlying VM."

      FYI - AWS has LOWER # disk volume limits per VM than Azure which supports up to 64:

      http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/volume_limits.html

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Will it still be over 100 times more expensive than Amazon and Google

      You clearly have no idea what a container is, or have even used Azure

  2. AMBxx Silver badge
    Windows

    Dumb question maybe?

    What would you run on a container in Azure that couldn't be provided by one of their existing services?

    1. TheVogon

      Re: Dumb question maybe?

      "What would you run on a container in Azure that couldn't be provided by one of their existing services?"

      Something where you didn't want to have to care about creating the underlying VMs and orchestration layer? Just load it and go.... Or something where the per second billing makes more sense?

      1. Adam 52 Silver badge

        Re: Dumb question maybe?

        And price, for a small app with no disc footprint this is about half the price of a fully fledged VM.

        1. AMBxx Silver badge

          Re: Dumb question maybe?

          I didn't mean as an alternative to a vm, but as an alternative to all the other Azure options.

          1. Adam 52 Silver badge

            Re: Dumb question maybe?

            App service lets you deploy code and everything else is managed for you but you're limited to supported languages and libraries.

            VMs give you complete flexibility but you have to manage them yourself.

            Containers are in between, you manage your app and its software stack (including patching libraries) but MS make sure the resources you've asked for are available, even if that means provisioning more VMs and moving load around.

            I, personally, wouldn't host persistent storage in a container and would use something managed like SQL Azure / DynamoDB / Spanner but some do.

            1. mr_splodge

              Re: Dumb question maybe?

              That, and you're broken out of vendor lock-in. Move your containers between Azure, AWS, on-prem, whatever you want no hassels. Try doing that to an app service plan!

  3. Tom 38

    What about control of resources?

    Containers only work well if you can manage their resources, especially disk IO. chroot is essentially all a container is without those controls.

    It's funny for me, we started with bare metal, then we moved to containers (FreeBSD jails), which we eventually abandoned for VMs because of the lack of IO resource control in jails, and now we're moving everything to Docker (which does have these controls).

    1. TheVogon

      Re: What about control of resources?

      Resource governance settings are specified in the application manifest file as part of a service code package....

  4. johnnyblaze

    So easy...

    The end goal being to make it so easy and simple to deploy anything in the cloud, you actually forget you've done it.... until the bills arrive :)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @The Vogon

    I'm not sure what's so exciting about how much the vendors we deal with are raking in cash; the higher they profit the more they are screwing us.

    1. TheVogon

      Re: @The Vogon

      "the higher they profit the more they are screwing us."

      Or the more attractive a service they are providing to drive that business in a very competitive market?

      There is plenty of choice in cloud, but only two really big horses to put your money on....

      I prefer Azure both technically and because of the lack of lock-in compared to AWS. For instance if you write something for Dynamo DB, how are you ever going to run it anywhere else? If you write for SQL server you can still choose to run it on premise or in most other clouds...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "There is plenty of choice in cloud, but only two really big horses to put your money on...."

    Yes, and that's absolutely not a good thing.

    "I prefer Azure both technically and because of the lack of lock-in compared to AWS. For instance if you write something for Dynamo DB, how are you ever going to run it anywhere else? If you write for SQL server you can still choose to run it on premise or in most other clouds..."

    They are both terrible for lock-in. A rock and a hard place.

    SQL Server is okay but not good value unless you run huge workloads, limited to running on Windows (for now) and has ridiculously complex on prem. licensing (yes Oracle is worse, but not by much).

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