As presented on 21st of March 2018 at TechDays Finland. There’s a plethora of Container-related services available in Azure. Azure Container Instance, Azure Container Registry, and Azure Container Service to name a few. It can be hard to get your head around all of them, especially if you come from Microsoft background as I did. I will cover each of these services in this talk, explain their differencies and help you figure out which scenarios they fit best. If you’re new to Containers, you should feel more comfortable around them after this session.

1. Navigating in the sea of Containers
in Azure: when to choose which
service and why?
Karl Ots, Azure MVP
Kompozure

2. Karl Ots
• Cloud & cybersecurity consultant
• Working on Azure since 2011
• Patented inventor
• Organizing Finland Azure User Group and
IglooConf
• Podcast host at Cloud Gossip

3. Agenda
• Container & Orchestration 101
• Containers in Azure
• Tooling
• Roadmap

4. First, a walk down the memory lane

5. History
• Brendan Burns joined Microsoft in 2016
• Gabe Monroy joined Microsoft in 2017 (Deis acquisition)
• Major focus on supporting open source in the cloud

6. What is a container?
Containers = operating system virtualization
OS
Kernel
Applications
Container Container Container
Hardware
Traditional virtual machines = hardware virtualization
Hardware
OS
Application
VM VM VM
App
OS
App
OS
App
OS

7. Container orchestration
• Creating a single container is easy (especially when using Docker
containers), even doing an application with 4 or 5 containers is easy
• As soon as you get to production workloads with 10’s or hundreds
of container images, scaling to thousands of running containers it
gets hard
• Orchestrator takes your containers and deploys them within a pool
of virtual machines, then monitor their health as they run, load
balancing them as required.
• Historically orchestrators have been a pretty big pain to set up since
each has a set of specific dependencies and expects a particular
topology

8. Azure container strategy
Embrace containers
as ubiquitous
Support containers
across the compute
portfolio
Democratize
container technology

9. Azure container ecosystem
IaaSPaaS
Azure services
SQL Database
Redis Cache
CosmosDB
And more!
Partner services
OpenShift
Pivotal Cloud
Foundry
Docker Enterprise
Edition
Mesosphere
DC/OS
Azure
Azure
Container
Registry
(ACR)
OSBA
Azure Kubernetes
Service (AKS)
ACS
Engine
Batch
Azure Container
Instances (ACI)
Azure Virtual
Machines
Virtual Machine
Scale Sets
(VMSS)
Service Fabric
Virtual kubelet
App Service

10. Containers in Azure
• Azure Container Instance
• Create a container from an Azure image without worrying about virtual machines
underneath
• az container create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name mycontainer --image
microsoft/aci-helloworld --cpu 1 --memory 1 --ip-address public --ports 80
• Azure Container Registry
• Store your Docker images in a private registry as a service
• Azure Container Service
• Create DC/OS, Swarm or Kubernetes cluster in Azure

11. Azure Container Instances (ACI)
$ az container create --name mycontainer --image
microsoft/aci-helloworld --resource-group myResourceGroup --
ip-address public

12. DEMO
Azure Container Instances

13. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
IaaSPaaS
Azure services
SQL Database
Redis Cache
CosmosDB
And more!
Partner services
OpenShift
Pivotal Cloud
Foundry
Docker Enterprise
Edition
Mesosphere
DC/OS
Azure
Azure
Container
Registry
(ACR)
OSBA
Batch
Azure Container
Instances (ACI)
Azure Virtual
Machines
Virtual Machine
Scale Sets
(VMSS)
Service Fabric
Virtual kubelet
App Service
Azure Kubernetes
Service (AKS)
ACS
Engine

14. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Kubernetes control plane as a service
• Master nodes managed by Microsoft
• Automatic upgrades
• Self-healing Masters
• Easy Cluster scaling
• Etcd SSD-backed with HA and backup/restore support
• Standard upstream Kuberenetes

15. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
$ az aks create
• -c == count of nodes / agents
• Default 3, minimum 1
• -k == kubernets version you want
• -s == node vm size (default standard ds1_v2)
• --ssh-key-value my public key
$ az aks get-credentials
• Retrieves kubeconfig info from cluster and appends into current local kubeconfig
$ kubectl get nodes

16. DEMO
Azure Kubernetes Service

17. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
$ az aks list
$ az aks upgrade
$ kubectl get nodes
$ az aks scale

18. Tools
• az cli
• shell.azure.com
• VSCode
• VSCode extensions:
• vs-kubernetes
• vs-helm

19. Tools, continued
• Draft for containment and
service composition
• Helm for application
deployment and package
management
• Brigade for automating critical
developer and operations tasks
• Kashti: Visualization dashboard
for Brigade

20. “Serverless” Kubernetes?

21. Resources
• Play with Docker
• https://training.play-with-docker.com/
• Azure Container Service documentation
• https://github.com/Azure/acs-engine/blob/master/docs/kubernetes.md
• Azure Kubernetes Service Commands
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/aks?view=azure-cli-latest
• Using ACI with Kubernetes
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/resources/videos/using-kubernetes-with-azure-
container-instances/
• All things Microsoft and Open Source
• https://open.microsoft.com/
• Podcast: Brendan Burns and Gabe Monroy on Impact and Future of Kubernetes (KubeCon +
CloudNativeCon 2017)
• https://changelog.com/podcast/282

22. Thank you!
Thank you!