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Azure Container Instances

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Re: Azure Container Instances

#81

Post by purvis »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #43

What's really got me excited lately is the combination of Ansible (for dirty work) and container orchestration systems like Kubernetes/Rancher/etc (also, tools that go from one orchestrated host to many like dokku and flynn). While I appreciate the competition from GCE and Azure, what I really want is a tool that will run in any one of their clouds, but offers the same ease-of-management, and lets me go from one clou…

> Terraform is basically this tool, but I want an even easier interface, terraform still feels somewhat too specific to me -- I don't want to even have to write config or specify some "aws" adapter that will make my config work on some provider. I want instant, multi-cloud (possibly) heroku, using only the network, hard-drive-space, ram, and lxc "primitives".

This sounds very similar to some ideas I've been stewing on over the past few months. One of them being a multi-cloud terraform-like tool which abstracts away the low level details of which provider an instance is provisioned onto (whichever is currently cheapest). It could also automatically determine how firewall/security groups/networking should be configured.

If you happen to create two instances in two different providers that need to communicate privately over say port 443, the security groups would be updated automatically to account for this, bridging the two providers.

One major thing to consider in doing this is the bandwidth. If you look at the fine print in these providers, the outgoing bandwidth is where they really get you. So if your backup server is in a different provider than your database, you might see some hefty data transfer fees while performing a daily backup.

Just curious, what's your background? Are you an infrastructure type, or are you a general developer who just wants a tool like you've described? Sometimes I can't tell if this is something people really want or if I've just drank too much of the infrastructure automation koolaid.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#82

Post by gnepzhao »

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…

Hi,

I'm one of cofounders of Hyper. Thanks for mentioning us!

I think both ECS and GKE are valid options their segment. Things like ACI and Hyper.sh is more of a container-native IaaS. The on-demand event-driven compute infra is a perfect use case, but it also works for long-running workload (k8s pool), where the difference is that developers only need to consume the k8s api, not the software itself.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#83

Post by sz4kerto »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #53
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…

Even with the fixed pricing data... it's still ~$360 a month, right? So that's about 3x as much to not manage the VMs yourself in a cluster. For even a moderate cluster, that seems like it would rapidly stop making sense.

Depends. If it's a short job, then setting up a new VM for it or even planning where it should run might take a few engineer hours. And engineer hours are really expensive.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#84

Post by cjsuk »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #67
convolvatron wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the clear end goal here is that you have to deal with things like 'provisioning virtual disks' and 'doing ubuntu updates'. this whole virtualization thing received you of the burden of buying pci ethernet nics and rack mount brackets and provisioning cooling. but really this whole business of writing chef recipes and provisioning harnesses is really the same kind stuff. it seems important because you can't run withou…

For me at the very least it's cost -- I can purchase a cheap VPS and run a bunch of stuff on it, with full control for much cheaper than what an AWS EC2 instance costs monthly (with better specs). Compare this: http://www.ec2instances.info/?cost_duration=monthly To VPS hosting from providers like: https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/ https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/dedicatedcore-vps/ The value provided by the services be…

This. Also the cost advantage of your typical t2.micro instance disappears when you run out of CPU credits instantly running updates in...

Re: Azure Container Instances

#85

Post by bdburns »

anonacct37 wrote: post #69
djhworld wrote: post #63

What's nice about this is the directness of it. As far as I understand, with services like AWS ECS you need to provision the infrastructure first and pay for its uptime, whereas this allows more ephemeral containers to be run with minimal setup, and you only pay for the compute time used Would only be useful for short lived jobs, but a really nice idea none the less.

I don't want to spread FUD, but my understanding is that the container security model is not 100% and that's why people like AWS force your containers to run on EC2 instances. The container security model will almost certainly improve in the future, but for now I'm only ok with other people in my same company sharing the kernel, not incentivised attackers. [edit] I'm going to unfud my comment. Some further reading ma…

Azure Container Instances developer here...

Each container has hypervisor level isolation. We are not relying on kernel level isolation for security isolation between different user's containers.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#86

Post by gnepzhao »

benaadams wrote: post #11
Ghostium wrote: post #5

"Each container deployed is securely isolated from other customers using proven virtualization technology. " Does anybody know if they mentioned anywhere what they use? LXC or Jails? Or some homegrown stuff?

Just as a guess Hyper-V containers? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...

github.com/hyperhq/runv

Re: Azure Container Instances

#87

Post by dragonwriter »

rifung wrote: post #80
CharlesW wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

While we've passed the point that this shows up in the timestamp, the message that indicated the change to the title was 1 minute before the one asking the question about where the term was used.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#88

Post by stephengillie »

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?

Containers allow different EXEs to leverage different versions of the same DLL, much as the WinSxS folder does. It solves some problems that Windows previously solved, in new ways.

Also it prevents "server bloat", where a web or AD-LDAP server gets incidental utility roles attached, like running scripts or being a bastion/jump-box. You can't really RDP to the container, so you can't update DNS from there.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#89

Post by Selfcommit »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #49
Selfcommit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Last time I tried using GAE beta with custom Docker containers (±last year) it was an epic journey of pain and confusion. The docs are split-brain between standard and beta and the rapidly evolving APIs paired with equally rapid out of date (official) example projects is completely schizo. [edit: I should mention, though, I loved that they have those example projects at all! It was just frustrating to constantly be b…

I feel that pain on the splitbrain docs. That's my number one complaint about their API's - I'm never sure if I'm on the newest. That said, there's a "familiarity" to them... once you figure out how things changed it's easy to quickly determine the age of a code sample.

You should try the custom runtime again! It's come a long way since Beta.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#90

Post by WestCoastJustin »

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?

Security and upgrade paths play a massive role.
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