Practice – Azure Container Instances (ACI) Deployment using Azure CLI

Azure Container Instances Overview

if you are using containers or just started you should definitely check out other container instances, today I will give you a brief on how can you deploy ACI using Azure CLI
before we start with what container instances are, let’s talk about What are containers?

A container is a standardized unit of software, what does this mean?
It has just a package software that should be able to run reliably between each another computing environment so that sounds very similar to what virtual machines are so let’s talk about

What is the difference between virtual machines and containers?
So in the case of virtual machines, there’s always a host, the host is created from the infrastructure on top of which there’s a hub hypervisor running this hypervisor is responsible for hosting virtual machines and managing them so there’s always a virtual machine on which you always have something called guest operating system so, therefore, you need to virtualize an entire operating system for you to be able to host your application and you need to do that again for every single application.
When it comes to containers you also have a host that hosts again the infrastructure but what’s a difference here is, you have a host operating system on top of which something called run time this run time is responsible for hosting and managing containers but what is good here is that from here onwards you can just host containers, you no longer need that guest operating system for each application and each container, therefore, releasing a lot of unnecessary resources which allow you to host more containers and more applications

So the main difference here

Less development overhead so your developers don’t need to create those images for virtual machines which takes a lot of time. Creating containers take just minutes as you’ve seen there are no guest operating systems, so there are much fewer resources consumed, also since there’s no guest operating system loaded into the container the file itself is in a much smaller size it’s from hundreds of megabytes down to 20 30 megabytes of size since the small size is there and the less consumption is required that means they also are starting up faster you can get your containers running in just seconds.

Here are some of Azure Container Instances (ACI) benefits:

• Fast startup: Launch containers in seconds.
• Per second billing: Incur costs only while the container is running.
• Hypervisor-level security: Isolate your application as completely as it would be in a VM.
• Custom sizes: Specify exact values for CPU cores and memory.
• Persistent storage: Mount Azure Files shares directly to a container to retrieve and persist state.
• Linux and Windows: Schedule both Windows and Linux containers using the same API.

az group create --name RG-ACI-Exercise --location westeurope

DNS_NAME_LABEL=aci-demo-$RANDOM

az container create \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name mycontainer \
--image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-helloworld \
--ports 80 \
--dns-name-label $DNS_NAME_LABEL \
--location westeurope

az container show \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name mycontainer \
--query "{FQDN:ipAddress.fqdn,ProvisioningState:provisioningState}" \
--output table

az container show --name mycontainer --resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise --query "{FQDN:ipAddress.ip}" --output table

az container create \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name mycontainer-restart-demo \
--image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-wordcount:latest \
--restart-policy OnFailure \
--location westeurope

az container show \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name mycontainer-restart-demo \
--query "containers[0].instanceView.currentState.state"

az container logs \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name mycontainer-restart-demo

COSMOS_DB_NAME=aci-cosmos-db-$RANDOM

COSMOS_DB_ENDPOINT=$(az cosmosdb create \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name $COSMOS_DB_NAME \
--query documentEndpoint \
--output tsv)

COSMOS_DB_MASTERKEY=$(az cosmosdb keys list \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name $COSMOS_DB_NAME \
--query primaryMasterKey \
--output tsv)

az container create \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name aci-demo \
--image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/azure-vote-front:cosmosdb \
--ip-address Public \
--location westeurope \
--environment-variables \
COSMOS_DB_ENDPOINT=$COSMOS_DB_ENDPOINT \
COSMOS_DB_MASTERKEY=$COSMOS_DB_MASTERKEY

az container show \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name aci-demo \
--query ipAddress.ip \
--output tsv

In a browser, go to your container’s IP address, Once the app is available, you’ll see this.

Try casting a vote for cats or dogs. Each vote is stored in your Azure Cosmos DB instance.

Use secured environment variables to hide connection information

az container show \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name aci-demo \
--query containers[0].environmentVariables

az container create \
--resource-group RG-ACI-Exercise \
--name aci-demo-secure \
--image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/azure-vote-front:cosmosdb \
--ip-address Public \
--location westeurope \
--secure-environment-variables \
COSMOS_DB_ENDPOINT=$COSMOS_DB_ENDPOINT \
COSMOS_DB_MASTERKEY=$COSMOS_DB_MASTERKEY