Manage security for Azure Container Instances (ACI)​

  • 5 minutes

Azure Container Instances (ACI), is a PaaS service for scenario that can operate in isolated containers, including simple applications, task automation, and build jobs. For scenarios where you need full container orchestration, including service discovery across multiple containers, automatic scaling, and coordinated application upgrades, we recommend Azure Kubernetes Service (which will be covered later on in this lesson).

Features of ACI

Fast startup times Containers offer significant startup benefits over virtual machines (VMs). Azure Container Instances can start containers in Azure in seconds, without the need to provision and manage VMs.

Container access

  • Azure Container Instances enables exposing your container groups directly to the internet with an IP address and a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). When you create a container instance, you can specify a custom DNS name label so your application is reachable at customlabel.azureregion.azurecontainer.io.
  • Azure Container Instances also supports executing a command in a running container by providing an interactive shell to help with application development and troubleshooting. Access takes places over HTTPS, using TLS to secure client connections.

Container deployment

Deploy containers from DockerHub or Azure Container Registry.

Hypervisor-level security Historically, containers have offered application dependency isolation and resource governance but have not been considered sufficiently hardened for hostile multi-tenant usage. Azure Container Instances guarantees your application is as isolated in a container as it would be in a VM.

Custom sizes Containers are typically optimized to run just a single application, but the exact needs of those applications can differ greatly. Azure Container Instances provides optimum utilization by allowing exact specifications of CPU cores and memory. You pay based on what you need and get billed by the second, so you can fine-tune your spending based on actual need.

For compute-intensive jobs such as machine learning, Azure Container Instances can schedule Linux containers to use NVIDIA Tesla GPU resources.

Persistent storage To retrieve and persist state with Azure Container Instances, we offer direct mounting of Azure Files shares backed by Azure Storage.

Flexible billing

Supports per-GB, per-CPU, and per-second billing.

Linux and Windows containers Azure Container Instances can schedule both Windows and Linux containers with the same API. Simply specify the OS type when you create your container groups.

Some features are currently restricted to Linux containers:

  • Multiple containers per container group
  • Volume mounting (Azure Files, emptyDir, GitRepo, secret)
  • Resource usage metrics with Azure Monitor
  • Virtual network deployment
  • GPU resources (preview)

For Windows container deployments, use images based on common Windows base images.

Co-scheduled groups Azure Container Instances supports scheduling of multi-container groups that share a host machine, local network, storage, and lifecycle. This enables you to combine your main application container with other supporting role containers, such as logging sidecars.

Virtual network deployment Currently available for production workloads in a subset of Azure regions, this feature of Azure Container Instances enables deployment of container instances into an Azure virtual network. By deploying container instances into a subnet within your virtual network, they can communicate securely with other resources in the virtual network, including those that are on premises (through VPN gateway or ExpressRoute).