Prerequisite Knowledge
Before we start with the understanding of Microsoft Container, we should have:
Background
In this article, we will explore Microsoft Azure Container and its services. Before we look into it, let’s understand some things:
- For large organizations, it would be difficult to manage several applications with lots of servers and operating systems.
- Creating and managing the infrastructure would be a difficult and lengthy process.
- Container is running applications on the shared operating system using operating system virtualization without the need for a virtual machine.
- Machine virtualization is like Hyper-V which has a partition of each operating system.
- Containers take a single operating system installation and simulate lots of operating system installations.
- All containers can share the same operating system with their own configuration and patches.
- With the help of docker, we can easily manage it with container services.
- It helps developers to quickly deploy the new services with new versions to containers.
- Important: Difference in virtual machine and container
- Virtual Machine
Virtual machine requires a separate operating system and is not shared.
- Container
Container shares the same host's operating system.
Introduction of Microsoft Azure Container
- Azure has the capability of abstracting the applications from the environment and infrastructure with the help of containers.
- It simplifies the way to deploy the applications, way of the system administrators to manage the environments which enable the portability between platforms and clouds.
- Azure containers are built using an image repository.
- Each container holds the required components to run the software like environment variables, library, files, etc.
- The container where it is hosted can not access all the physical resources like CPU, storage, and memory.
- We can host multiple container instances on the same machine which will share the same operating system with their own configuration.
- Development team can download the image (can be executable or service) and can host it to the container and deploy the container instance instantly.
- The applications which are hosted using the container method are called containerized applications.
- Containers have high portability because each image includes the dependencies needed to execute the code in a container.
- Containers are best for portability. We can move the applications that share the same host's operating system.
- It has a great ability to host many containers that share a single operating system.
- Container can be best suited for microservice applications where each service is isolated and operates on the same operating system.
- We can have operating systems like Linux or windows and on top of this, we can host the container.
- Container Solutions,
- Azure Container Instance
- It is a serverless way of doing the containers which don’t require a virtual machine or container orchestrators like Kubernetes or DC/OS.
- Azure container instance can start in seconds.
- Microsoft bills per second of usage and it is the cheapest way for the container.
- We don’t worry about VM management, we only think about the code in a container and run in the cloud.
- It is offering role-based access security for permission management in the container instance.
- Azure Container Service
- This is the service that can scale out the containers.
- It has clusters of VM’s to host the containers.
- It is best for simplified configurations of proven open-source container orchestration technology, Linux-based containers, optimized to run in the cloud
- Service Fabric
- Containers can use the service fabric and is a scale-set cluster of virtual machines
- We can use the docker command line to manage the containers but it's not recommended for large-scale management.
- For large scale management, we need to utilize the orchestration solution.
Reference Links
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/product-categories/containers/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/announcing-azure-container-instances/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/azure-container-service-is-now-generally-available/
Conclusion
In this article, we have learned an overview of Microsoft Azure Container. Keep Learning
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