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Azure Container Instances

azure.microsoft.com

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Re: Azure Container Instances

#51

Post by slap_shot »

I'm a co-founder of a stealth-stage company that helps data analysts/data engineers build data pipelines. Every "task" that can be done in our framework is essentially just an image that can be reused over and over with different settings.

We deploy these tasks across Kubernetes clusters on AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Since these tasks are schedule irregularly and are short lived, we had to do a lot of work to dynamically scale the nodes up a head of their demand and down after, and we typically have to pay for at least 10 minutes of usage no matter how quickly the job finishes.

This "pay-by-the-second" will be a huge win for us. Most of our tasks deal with S3/Redshift or GCS/BigQuery, do we can't immediately use this. But as we onboard more clients working with Azure Storage/Data Lake/Data Warehouse I see some big operational gains for us.

Here's hoping we see similar developments across the other major cloud providers. Very impressed with Azure's development in the last 3 years!

Re: Azure Container Instances

#52

Post by resouer »

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…

Yes. What hyper.sh is pitching for years is the "Container Native Cloud", and Azure ACI definitely shared the same idea. But will it become the future of cloud? I hope so.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#53

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

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.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#54

Post by convolvatron »

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…

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 without it, and thats what your whole day is...but really its pretty secondary to what you're actually trying to accomplish (run a service)

its interesting to think about what that world might look like...someone is going to make something like that stick at some point. so...why are people provisioning their own containers/vms instead of using the higher level services right now?

Re: Azure Container Instances

#56

Post by yebyen »

gabrtv wrote: post #22
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

Was looking to see if one of you guys turned up in this thread. "And how was the Deis team involved in this?" Didn't see any mention of you all in the article.

Thanks for showing up and weighing in on this! k8s connector looks really cool, is this a totally unique thing or are there anything comparable for ECS? I've never heard of a Kubernetes cluster with virtual nodes! Sounds like you could use this connector and potentially save yourself from ever needing to configure autoscaling in the Kube cluster.

I'm really curious how things are going at Microsoft for this incredibly productive team of people, from Deis, who have put out so much great software that has kept my attention. Hope that everything is great!

Re: Azure Container Instances

#57

Post by caleblloyd »

seanmck wrote: post #37
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…

The core second price at the top is incorrect. The per-second prices for cores and GBs are the same: $0.0000125. We are getting that fixed now.

So what you are saying is the calculation for 1 core, 1GB of memory for 1 month would be:

  0.0025 create + (0.0000125 1 core/second + 0.0000125 1GB memory/second) * 86400 seconds/day * 30 days/mo = $64.8025/mo
Is that correct? $64.8025 per month is pretty steep for 1 core and 1GB of memory, I guess this is targeted at short-lived jobs.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#58

Post by GordonS »

ybrah wrote: post #7

Lots of pains using Microsoft azure at my workplace. We always AWS when we're allowed, which isn't often enough. Lots of weird issues.

We use Azure without issue, and love it.

You might want to go into some details about your issues, because a comment that vague is not helpful.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#59

Post by bacongobbler »

tschellenbach wrote: post #33

I don't see why you need a container for your cloud instances. Puppet/Chef/Ansible are all much better solutions.

The value-add here is not to be running cloud instances in containers. Rather it allows you to run containers and be billed by the second, which opens the doors to short-lived jobs running in containers on the cloud. It's closer to serverless platforms rather than VMs.

Re: Azure Container Instances

#60

Post by bacongobbler »

caleblloyd wrote: post #57
seanmck wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core second price at the top is incorrect. The per-second prices for cores and GBs are the same: $0.0000125. We are getting that fixed now.

So what you are saying is the calculation for 1 core, 1GB of memory for 1 month would be: 0.0025 create + (0.0000125 1 core/second + 0.0000125 1GB memory/second) * 86400 seconds/day * 30 days/mo = $64.8025/mo Is that correct? $64.8025 per month is pretty steep for 1 core and 1GB of memory, I guess this is targeted at short-lived jobs.

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 the cloud.
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