Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Azure Container Instances

azure.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 117 posts

Re: Azure Container Instances

#71

Post by falcolas »

mistermann wrote: post #68
bacongobbler wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the billing is specifically targeted around per-second execution. The containers can start within a few seconds, they allow for customization of CPU cores and memory, and they allow you to focus entirely on your container without having to worry about any VM management. Traditional VM-based infrastructure is still the way to go for long-running applications. This just opens a new avenue into using containers in…

What would be some example use cases for this?

Off the top of my head, I'd say anything you might use Lambda and it's ilk for.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#72

Post by lindydonna »

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 equivalent of AWS Lambda is Azure Functions. It does have the same memory limits as AWS (max 1.5 GB per instance), though you can run for up to 10 minutes.

You can try for free for up to 1 hour (no credit card required!) at https://functions.azure.com/try.

(I'm a product manager on Azure Functions)

Re: Azure Container Instances

#73

Post by bacongobbler »

mistermann wrote: post #68
bacongobbler wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the billing is specifically targeted around per-second execution. The containers can start within a few seconds, they allow for customization of CPU cores and memory, and they allow you to focus entirely on your container without having to worry about any VM management. Traditional VM-based infrastructure is still the way to go for long-running applications. This just opens a new avenue into using containers in…

What would be some example use cases for this?

Off the top of my head, this could be used for backups, database migrations, auditing software, report generations, email blasts, CPU/memory intensive operations... The possibilities are endless because the execution layer is just a container, so you're not limited on what exactly is being run inside it.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#74

Post by lindydonna »

Analemma_ wrote: post #31
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…

It seems to me like it's supposed to be a more flexible, versatile equivalent of AWS Lambda: fired up for a quick operation based on some trigger, then immediately shut down. From that perspective the pricing doesn't seem too bad.

Not quite, the equivalent of AWS Lambda is Azure Functions. This is more like a managed container service.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#75

Post by [deleted] »

bpicolo wrote: post #28
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.

[deleted]

Re: Azure Container Instances

#76

Post by lindydonna »

bpicolo wrote: post #28
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.

FYI that Azure Functions doesn't have this limitation. Code is stored on your own storage account and you can go as high as you want.

(Disclosure: I'm a product manager on Azure Functions.)

Re: Azure Container Instances

#77

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

#78

Post by efficax »

garganzol wrote: post #34

I find it funny to see containers landing in Windows. While I fully approve the containers on Linux, to me it looks like Windows does not really need them: it already has a stable notion of executable files with full binary compatibility. An old but gold EXE format is your container. Please excuse my probable naivety, but am I missing something?

Containerization arose out of Linux namespaces. What you get is process segregation under the same kernel, like jails or chroots but more granual. So security, that's the answer.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#79

Post by gnepzhao »

gnarmis wrote: post #30
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 stuf…

Founder kicks in.

The vision is to merge PaaS into IaaS, e.g. a microservice-native cloud. I want to ask more details of the upper-layer features you imagine. Thanks!

Re: Azure Container Instances

#80

Post by rifung »

CharlesW wrote: post #16
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…

I wanted to see this in context but couldn't find it. Is the word "serverless" used in the article?

If you look at a reply to the comment you're replying to you'll see it previously in the title. It might have been posted between the change and your comment
Post reply on HN