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Deploy container instances into an Azure virtual network

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Azure Virtual Network provides secure, private networking for your Azure and on-premises resources. By deploying container groups into an Azure virtual network, your containers can communicate securely with other resources in the virtual network.

This article shows how to use the az container create command in the Azure CLI to deploy container groups to either a new virtual network or an existing virtual network.

Important

  • Subnets must be delegated before using a virtual network
  • Before deploying container groups in virtual networks, we suggest checking the limitation first. For networking scenarios and limitations, see Virtual network scenarios and resources for Azure Container Instances.
  • Container group deployment to a virtual network is generally available for Linux and Windows containers, in most regions where Azure Container Instances is available. For details, see available-regions.

Important

Network profiles have been retired as of the 2021-07-01 API version. If you're using this or a more recent version, ignore any steps and actions related to network profiles.

Examples in this article are formatted for the Bash shell. If you prefer another shell such as PowerShell or Command Prompt, adjust the line continuation characters accordingly.

Prerequisites

You need a resource group to manage all the resources used in the following examples. To create a resource group, use az group create:

az group create --name myResourceGroup --location eastus

Deploy to new virtual network

Note

If you are using subnet IP range /29 to have only 3 IP addresses. we recommend always to go one range above (never below). For example, use subnet IP range /28 so you can have at least 1 or more IP buffer per container group. By doing this, you can avoid containers in stuck, not able to start, restart or even not able to stop states.

To deploy to a new virtual network and have Azure create the network resources for you automatically, specify the following when you execute az container create:

  • Virtual network name
  • Virtual network address prefix in CIDR format
  • Subnet name
  • Subnet address prefix in CIDR format

The virtual network and subnet address prefixes specify the address spaces for the virtual network and subnet, respectively. These values are represented in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation, for example 10.0.0.0/16. For more information about working with subnets, see Add, change, or delete a virtual network subnet.

Once you deploy your first container group with this method, you can deploy to the same subnet by specifying the virtual network and subnet names, or the network profile that Azure automatically creates for you. Because Azure delegates the subnet to Azure Container Instances, you can deploy only container groups to the subnet.

Example

The following az container create command specifies settings for a new virtual network and subnet. Provide the name of a resource group that was created in a region where container group deployments in a virtual network are available. This command deploys the public Microsoft aci-helloworld container that runs a small Node.js webserver serving a static web page. In the next section, you'll deploy a second container group to the same subnet, and test communication between the two container instances.

az container create \
  --name appcontainer \
  --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-helloworld \
  --vnet aci-vnet \
  --vnet-address-prefix 10.0.0.0/16 \
  --subnet aci-subnet \
  --subnet-address-prefix 10.0.0.0/24

When you deploy to a new virtual network by using this method, the deployment can take a few minutes while the network resources are created. After the initial deployment, further container group deployments to the same subnet complete more quickly.

Deploy to existing virtual network

To deploy a container group to an existing virtual network:

  1. Create a subnet within your existing virtual network, use an existing subnet in which a container group is already deployed, or use an existing subnet emptied of all other resources and configuration. The subnet that you use for container groups can contain only container groups. Before you deploy a container group to a subnet, you must explicitly delegate the subnet before provisioning. Once delegated, the subnet can be used only for container groups. If you attempt to deploy resources other than container groups to a delegated subnet, the operation fails.
  2. Deploy a container group with az container create and specify one of the following:
    • Virtual network name and subnet name
    • Virtual network resource ID and subnet resource ID, which allows using a virtual network from a different resource group

Example

The following example deploys a second container group to the same subnet created previously, and verifies communication between the two container instances.

First, get the IP address of the first container group you deployed, the appcontainer:

az container show --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --name appcontainer \
  --query ipAddress.ip --output tsv

The output displays the IP address of the container group in the private subnet. For example:

10.0.0.4

Now, set CONTAINER_GROUP_IP to the IP you retrieved with the az container show command, and execute the following az container create command. This second container, commchecker, runs an Alpine Linux-based image and executes wget against the first container group's private subnet IP address.

CONTAINER_GROUP_IP=<container-group-IP-address>

az container create \
  --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --name commchecker \
  --image alpine:3.5 \
  --command-line "wget $CONTAINER_GROUP_IP" \
  --restart-policy never \
  --vnet aci-vnet \
  --subnet aci-subnet

After this second container deployment completes, pull its logs so you can see the output of the wget command it executed:

az container logs --resource-group myResourceGroup --name commchecker

If the second container communicated successfully with the first, output is similar to:

Connecting to 10.0.0.4 (10.0.0.4:80)
index.html           100% |*******************************|  1663   0:00:00 ETA

The log output should show that wget was able to connect and download the index file from the first container using its private IP address on the local subnet. Network traffic between the two container groups remained within the virtual network.

Example - YAML

You can also deploy a container group to an existing virtual network by using a YAML file, a Resource Manager template, or another programmatic method such as with the Python SDK.

For example, when using a YAML file, you can deploy to a virtual network with a subnet delegated to Azure Container Instances. Specify the following properties:

  • ipAddress: The private IP address settings for the container group.
    • ports: The ports to open, if any.
    • protocol: The protocol (TCP or UDP) for the opened port.
  • subnetIds: The resource IDs of the subnets to be deployed to
    • id: The resource ID of the subnet
    • name: The name of the subnet

This YAML creates a container group named appcontaineryaml in your virtual network.

apiVersion: '2021-07-01'
location: westus
name: appcontaineryaml
properties:
  containers:
  - name: appcontaineryaml
    properties:
      image: mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-helloworld
      ports:
      - port: 80
        protocol: TCP
      resources:
        requests:
          cpu: 1.0
          memoryInGB: 1.5
  ipAddress:
    type: Private
    ports:
    - protocol: tcp
      port: '80'
  osType: Linux
  restartPolicy: Always
  subnetIds:
    - id: <subnet-id>
      name: default
tags: null
type: Microsoft.ContainerInstance/containerGroups

Deploy the container group with the az container create command, specifying the YAML file name for the --file parameter:

az container create --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --file vnet-deploy-aci.yaml

Once the deployment completes, run the az container show command to display its status. Sample output:

Name              ResourceGroup    Status    Image                                       IP:ports     Network    CPU/Memory       OsType    Location
----------------  ---------------  --------  ------------------------------------------  -----------  ---------  ---------------  --------  ----------
appcontaineryaml  myResourceGroup  Running   mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-helloworld  10.0.0.5:80  Private    1.0 core/1.5 gb  Linux     westus

Clean up resources

Delete container instances

When you're done working with the container instances you created, delete them with the following commands:

az container delete --resource-group myResourceGroup --name appcontainer -y
az container delete --resource-group myResourceGroup --name commchecker -y
az container delete --resource-group myResourceGroup --name appcontaineryaml -y

Delete network resources

This feature currently requires several additional commands to delete the network resources you created earlier. If you used the example commands in previous sections of this article to create your virtual network and subnet, then you can use the following script to delete those network resources. The script assumes that your resource group contains a single virtual network with a single network profile.

Before executing the script, set the RES_GROUP variable to the name of the resource group containing the virtual network and subnet that should be deleted. Update the name of the virtual network if you didn't use the aci-vnet name suggested earlier. The script is formatted for the Bash shell. If you prefer another shell such as PowerShell or Command Prompt, you need to adjust variable assignment and accessors accordingly.

Warning

This script deletes resources! It deletes the virtual network and all subnets it contains. Be sure that you no longer need any of the resources in the virtual network, including any subnets it contains, prior to running this script. Once deleted, these resources are unrecoverable.

# Replace <my-resource-group> with the name of your resource group
# Assumes one virtual network in resource group
RES_GROUP=<my-resource-group>

# Get network profile ID
# Assumes one profile in virtual network
NETWORK_PROFILE_ID=$(az network profile list --resource-group $RES_GROUP --query [0].id --output tsv)

# Delete the network profile
az network profile delete --id $NETWORK_PROFILE_ID -y

# Delete virtual network
az network vnet delete --resource-group $RES_GROUP --name aci-vnet

Next steps