This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints
Should we use managed Containers as a Service (CaaS)? That must be the most crucial question we should try to answer. Unfortunately, it is hard to provide a universal answer since the solutions differ significantly from one provider to another. Currently (July 2020), CaaS can be described as wild west with solutions ranging from amazing to useless.
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+.
Kubernetes' Cluster Autoscaler is a prime example of the differences between different managed Kubernetes offerings. We'll use it to compare the three major Kubernetes-as-a-Service providers.
I'll limit the comparison between the vendors only to the topics related to Cluster Autoscaling.
Continue reading