Chapter 19. Azure containers
Containers, Docker, and Kubernetes have gained a huge following in a few short years. In the same way that server virtualization started to change how IT departments ran their datacenters in the mid-2000s, modern container tools and orchestrators are now shaking up how we build and run applications. There’s nothing that inherently connects the growth of containers with cloud computing, but when combined, they provide a great way to develop applications with a cloud-native approach.
Entire books have been written on Docker and Kubernetes, but let’s go on a whirlwind introduction and see how you can quickly run containers in Azure. There’s a powerful suite of Azure services dedicated to containers that aligns more with the PaaS approach. You can focus on how to build and run your applications, rather than how to manage the container infrastructure, orchestration, and cluster components. In this chapter, we examine what containers are, how Docker got involved, and what Kubernetes can do for you. To see how to quickly run either a single container instance or multiple container instances in a cluster, we explore Azure Container Instances (ACI) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).