Are you looking to get into application software investing? If you are, you’re probably aware of the fact that barely a day can go by without some news circulating about a container service. And today, it’s Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:$MSFT) turn to join the conversation. The Redmond, Washington-based company will launch a new container service for its Azure cloud computing platform: Azure Container Instances (ACI).
In addition, Microsoft announced today that it will be joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a platinum member, which is a $370,000/year commitment.
Even though there have been a number of container services from the top cloud vendors, ACI will be different from the likes of Azure’s existing Container Service, AWS’s EC2 Container Service and the Google Container Engine.
Microsoft’s Azure Container Instances is now in preview, and it seems to be all about simplicity. It will let you spin up a single container with your choice of memory and CPU cores in a matter of seconds. Additionally, usage is billed by the second. Microsoft has stressed that these containers are first-class objects on Azure and it will get all of the same role-based access controls, billing tags, and other features one would expect on the platform.
However, you don’t get the hassle of having to manage VMs or doing research on container orchestration. If using orchestration is something that you want, check out Microsoft’s new open source Kubernetes connector.
As of right now, ACI will only support Linux containers but it will soon support Windows Containers. With its speed, it is likely that ACI will be used the most for bursty workloads and scaling. One of the advantages of containers is that you can move them with ease between services, therefore switching from ACI to a VM-based container infrastructure shouldn’t be an issue.
“This offers a level of agility for deploying Kubernetes, unlike any other cloud provider, enabling services that start in seconds without any underlying VMs and are billed and scaled per second,” Corey Sanders, Microsoft’s Head of Product for Azure Compute, said in today’s announcement.
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