Enlarge (credit: Ana Ulin)

Azure Container Instances (ACI), which let you create Linux and Windows containers without having to manage the virtual machines they run on, are now generally available.
ACI brings serverless principles to containerized applications. Serverless computing, pioneered by Amazon's Lambda and found on Azure as Functions, is designed to defer all system management (physical and virtual machine deployment and patching) and load-based scaling decisions to the platform provider. Developers just write their application code; they no longer have to care about spinning up virtual machines, updating operating systems, cutting over to new hardware, or anything else.
Traditional container deployments require virtual machines to run on. With ACI's serverless containers, the management of those virtual machines goes away. ACI containers can be deployed using Microsoft's own Azure interface, or with Kubernetes, without needing any VMs to be spun up first. The containers are billed according to how much processor time and memory they use on a per second basis: $0.000012 per CPU-second, $0.000004 per GB of memory-second.

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