Azure Container Instances

What do you like best?

Azure Container Instances allows you to instantly create a secure container for development use - without the need for virtual machines. This allows you to run any instances that can operate in isolated containers. These have many advantages over standard virtual machines.

Positives:

- Much faster to start than virtual machines

- Minimal provisioning/management needed compared to virtual machines

- Security - isolated to a hypervisor level

What do you dislike?

- Running a constant 24 hours a day instance on the platform is much more expensive than running a virtual machine instance 24/7

- User interface isn't always the most intuitive - relatively new service so some sub-context menus aren't quite logical yet

However, this is a great service and I think that the positives outweigh the negatives, especially with MS Azure's superb customer/client relations team.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Have a play around with the software before getting specialist help from Azure. This is the best way you can gain experience from ACI since different users may have different use cases depending.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Deploying a container is SO much faster than deploying a virtual machine. This significantly reduces downtime since virtual machine often require a lot of management from the admin side. This saves time and business cost. However bear in mind that containers are more expensive to run (generally) than their virtual machine usage equivalents so whilst you may be saving time and money in some areas containers generally cost more, particularly when you are running them 24 hours a day.