Getting Started with Azure Container Instances
I'm really pleased to announce the launch of my latest Pluralsight course, Azure Container Instances: Getting Started.
There's a lot of things to love about Azure Container Instances:
- They're the quickest and easiest way to run containers in Azure
- They offer a serverless per-second pricing model
- You can use them to run Windows containers
- You can mount Azure File shares as volumes
- They can be managed with super easy to learn Azure CLI commands
- They can be used with the "Virtual Kubelet" to provide elastic scale to an AKS cluster
- They also integrate well with other Azure services including Azure Functions and Logic Apps
- The concept of "container groups" allows you to implement the "sidecar pattern"
I go into details on all these in the course. The nice thing about ACI is that its not a huge intimidating service to learn. It's very accessible even if you're new to the whole world of containers.
Azure Container Instances can easily be created and managed using the Azure CLI. And I've made all my demo scripts available on GitHub at https://github.com/markheath/aci-getting-started
The demos include:
- How to run an instance of elasticsearch
- How to run the ghost blogging engine
- How to run Windows containers
- How to run an image hosted in a Private Container Registry
- How to mount an Azure File Share to a container
- I use this to show how to implement a serverless media transcoding task with FFMPEG
- How to mount a Git repository as a volume
- I use this to show how to implement a serverless CI build with Cake
- How to store secrets securely in a secure volume
- How to deploy multiple containers in a container group with an ARM template
- I use this to show how to deploy WordPress in a single ACI container group
ACI is of course a brand new Azure service, so there are still a few features that I'm waiting for. The Windows container support is missing some key features such as mounting volumes, Virtual Network integration is hopefully coming soon, and I'd like to see better Event Grid integration. But it's already a really useful service, and well worth a couple of hours of your time to learn!