Monthly Archives: July 2020

Using Docker To Deploy Applications To Azure Container Instances

This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

Azure Container Instances are a way to deploy containers in the Cloud. Based on that, you might think that ACI is not much different from other Containers as a Service solutions. But it is. It does not have horizontal scaling, nor any other features often associated with schedulers like Kubernetes. It is limited to the ability to run a single container in isolation. It is very similar to using Docker, except that it is in Azure, and that it saves us from worrying about the infrastructure needed to run containers.

So, if Azure Container Instances are very similar to Docker, why not use docker instead of az CLI? Fortunately, folks at Docker asked themselves the same question and released Docker Desktop that supports ACI. It is available since version 2.3.3+.

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Discussing The “Real” Expectations For Serverless Computing

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

What do I expect from serverless or, for that matter, any type of deployment services?

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What do I really think about managed Functions as a Service (FaaS)?

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

Personally, I do not think that managed Functions as a Service are a good idea. Functions are too small for my taste. The execution model in which each request is served by a fresh instance is deeply flawed. The pricing is too high for my budget.

All that being said, I can see use cases where managed FaaS is a perfect fit, but only if that would be the only flavor of serverless deployments. But it’s not, even though many are putting the equation between FaaS and serverless computing.

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Should we use managed Functions as a Service (FaaS)?

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

We should ask two significant questions when contemplating whether we should use managed Functions as a Service (FaaS) flavor of serverless computing. Should we use them? If we should, shall it be AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, or something completely different?

So, should we use managed FaaS? We probably should. But that’s not the right question. We can almost certainly find at least one good example. A more important question is whether managed FaaS can be the solution for a significant percentage of our workload. That’s the question that is much more difficult to tackle. To answer it, we might need first to establish good use cases for deploying and running functions.

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