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Azure Container Instances

azure.microsoft.com

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Re: Azure Container Instances

#21

Post by halestock »

013a wrote: post #14

Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice. This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is. That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... o…

Yeah, the examples they give during pricing definitely make it sounds like it's for one-off jobs or extremely short durations: "You create a container instance with a one core, two GB configuration 50 times daily during a month (30 days). The container duration of each instance is two minutes and 30 seconds."

Re: Azure Container Instances

#22

Post by gabrtv »

sammorrowdrums wrote: post #4

Does anyone know what service discovery, network security policy and ability to add multiple redundant copies of the same service this offers? I'm guessing it's powered heavily by kubernetes, so maybe that answers the question, but I'd be interested to know more about the details.

If you need service discovery, replicas, rolling deploys, etc. ACI probably isn't for you. Check some of the experimental work we released today connecting ACI with Kubernetes: https://github.com/Azure/aci-connector-k8s

Re: Azure Container Instances

#23

Post by [deleted] »

013a wrote: post #14

Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice. This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is. That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... o…

[deleted]

Re: Azure Container Instances

#24

Post by Selfcommit »

013a wrote: post #14

Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice. This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is. That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... o…

I don't think that unique really applies here - You can do the same with Google app engine standard runtime, or custom runtime if you want to use your own dockerfile. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/

Re: Azure Container Instances

#26

Post by gabrtv »

dragonwriter wrote: post #13

So, are we just now using “serverless” to just mean “dynamically scalable” the same way that “cloud” used to? Because, previously, “serverless” seemed to mean not needing to deal with anything lower-level infrastructure than function calls (that is, a higher level of abstraction than even a classical PaaS like GAE managed runtimes), while container hosting, dynamically scalable or not, is somewhere between classic Ia…

Serverless tends to be a conflation of 3 features:

1. Invisible infrastructure

2. Microbilling

3. Event-based programming model

ACI offers 1 and 2 without forcing 3, thanks to containers.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#27

Post by zbruhnke »

nsebban wrote: post #12
mankash666 wrote: post #3

If this works as advertised, it's awesome. It's like AWS lambda, without language restrictions, CPU or RAM throttling, etc. Truly serverless

Since you can basically run anything that fits inside a container, the comparison with AWS Lambda doesn't seem relevant to me. If you really want to draw a comparison with AWS product, it's pretty much a serverless EC2 ECS.

Actually Lambda was my first thought as well.

I'll give you an example - When I first discovered Lambda I had been working with containers for 6-8 months already and when I saw lambda it hit me that they just have container images capable of running python and node projects that this spin this up in and run the code we ask them to.

My mind immediately then went to our data pipeline that I'd like to run on a nightly schedule. This is typically done using a tool like Airflow or Luigi but I thought I could probably even just build the whole thing in lambda tasks that trigger via cron and SQS.

The reason we ultimately did not do that with Lambda was because it limited the amount of A. time and B. Compute resources one lambda task could use and we did not want to try to optimize for that when working with increasingly large amounts of data.

With something like this (ACI) I could actually do exactly this and even if its triggered by something like Airflow or Luigi I could run those on a much smaller instance and save the larger compute problems to being done on ACI in small spurts

Re: Azure Container Instances

#28

Post by bpicolo »

mankash666 wrote: post #3

If this works as advertised, it's awesome. It's like AWS lambda, without language restrictions, CPU or RAM throttling, etc. Truly serverless

The main limitation with lambda is really still code size. 50mb is tiny for all but trivial apps thanks to libraries.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#29

Post by boulos »

kuiper83 wrote: post #20
013a wrote: post #14

Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice. This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is. That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... o…

Looks like they have conflicting data on that page. Further down it quotes "$0.000013 for every Core-s used".

That number seems like a rounded version of the GB-seconds (0.0000125 => 1.3e-5)

Re: Azure Container Instances

#30

Post by gnarmis »

013a wrote: post #14

Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice. This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is. That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... o…

But Hyper.sh is still competitive, I think, even though it's super young. They already have a high level AWS Lambda alternative (Hyper Func) that uses containers and is fully language agnostic, and they have reasonable pricing-per-minute figured out.

They also have open sourced their tech [1], so for certain companies they probably are compelling.

Perhaps they should provide the kind of ease-of-use on top of the stuff they already provide that will cut open a steady market for them, like a Heroku but with this underlying tech and thus more dynamic on scaling and flexible on tech stack.

[1] https://github.com/hyperhq/runv is one example

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