Microsoft has revealed its Azure Container Instance (ACI) – a “simple and quick” way to deploy Linux containers in the cloud without “much” oversight and management.

According to Tech Republic, ACI only takes a few seconds to deploy and by using billing tags each container is billed by the second and admins can pick the number of virtual central processing units (vCPUs) and the amount of memory to make sure the container fits the application.

The director of computing for Microsoft Azure, Corey Sanders, said in a recent blog post: “Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is offered for each instance, and no virtual management (VM) tier or cluster orchestration tools are needed to get started. It is simply your code, in a container, running in the cloud.

“There are multiple deployment options for ACIs, starting with a template or the Azure Command Line Interface. However, users can deploy from a Docker Hub, or other public repository, as well as from a private repository.”

Microsoft launched its open source connector, letting users deploy ACIs from Kubernetes, so that organisations can deploy VMs alongside ACIs, allowing long-term scalability.

“Microsoft use virtualisation to make sure each container remains isolated from containers deployed by other organisations. Currently, container instances are only available for Linux containers, but Windows container support will be coming sometime in the coming weeks,” added Sanders.

The firm also offers a free container-hosting environment optimised for Azure, integrating with DCOS, Apache Mesos and Docker, to keep Azure relevant to emerging technologies and trends.

Written by Leah Alger