What is Microsoft Azure Container?

1. Pre-requisite Knowledge –

Before we start with the understanding of what is Microsoft Container, we should know –

1. 1. Basic knowledge of cloud computing and its services
   2. Basic knowledge of Microsoft Azure
   3. Basic knowledge of Virtual Machine, Operating System, Virtualization

2. Background –

In this article, we will explore what is Microsoft Azure Container and its services. Before we look into it, let’s understand -

• For large organizations, it would difficult to manage several applications with lots of servers and operating systems.
• Creating and managing the infrastructure would be a difficult and lengthy process.
• The container is nothing but a running application on the shared operating system using operating system virtualization without the need for the 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 its own configuration and patches.
• With the help of a 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 not shared.
  • Container: Container shares the same host operating system.

3. 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 administrator 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.
• The development team can download the image (can be executable or service) and can host the container and deploy the container instance instantly.
• The applications which are hosted using the container method are called as 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 shared the same host operating system.
• It has a great opportunity to host many containers that shared the single operating system.
• The 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 means which don’t require the virtual machine or container orchestrators like Kubernetes or DC/OS.
    • Azure container instance can start in the seconds.
    • Microsoft bills per second if usage and it is the cheapest way for the container.
    • We don’t worry about VM management, 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 has scaled out the containers.
    • It has clusters of VM’s 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 not recommended for lard scale management.
• For a large scale, management needs to utilize the orchestration solution.

4. Reference Links –

• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/product-categories/containers/
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/announcing-azure-container-instances/
• https://searchitoperations.techtarget.com/definition/container-containerization-or-container-based-virtualization
• https://stackify.com/azure-container-instances/
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/azure-container-service-is-now-generally-available/

Conclusion - In this article, we have learned the overview of Microsoft Azure Container.