Companies like Hyper [1] should be put on notice.<p>This is a surprisingly unique product. AWS ECS and GKE both require some form of management of the underlying VM. A lot of that management is abstracted away, but not in the same way this is.<p>That being said, pricing [2] seems odd. At $0.0000125/GB_Second and $0.001/Core_Second, lets say you want to replicate an Azure A3 instance (4core/7gb/$130). That would cost... over $10,000/mo. Is my math right on this? It can't be.<p>For one-off jobs, maybe this makes sense, but as the backbone of a Kubernetes pool or something I'm not so sure.<p>[1] <a href="https://hyper.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://hyper.sh/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/container-instances/" rel="nofollow">https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/container-...</a>
Tldr:<p>> An Azure Container Instance is a single container that starts in seconds and is billed by the second. ACI offer highly versatile sizing, allowing you to select the exact amount of memory separate from the exact count of vCPUs...<p><pre><code> az container create -g aci_grp --name nginx --image library/nginx --ip-address public –cpu 2 --memory 10
</code></pre>
There's also a k8s connector, promising faster spinup times:<p><a href="https://github.com/azure/aci-connector-k8s" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/azure/aci-connector-k8s</a>
So, are we just now using “serverless” to just mean “dynamically scalable” the same way that “cloud” used to?<p>Because, previously, “serverless” seemed to mean <i>not</i> needing to deal with anything lower-level infrastructure than function calls (that is, a higher level of abstraction than even a classical PaaS like GAE managed runtimes), while container hosting, dynamically scalable or not, is somewhere between classic IaaS and classic application-language PaaS.
I'm a co-founder of a stealth-stage company that helps data analysts/data engineers build data pipelines. Every "task" that can be done in our framework is essentially just an image that can be reused over and over with different settings.<p>We deploy these tasks across Kubernetes clusters on AWS, GCP, and Azure.<p>Since these tasks are schedule irregularly and are short lived, we had to do a lot of work to dynamically scale the nodes up a head of their demand and down after, and we typically have to pay for at least 10 minutes of usage no matter how quickly the job finishes.<p>This "pay-by-the-second" will be a huge win for us. Most of our tasks deal with S3/Redshift or GCS/BigQuery, do we can't immediately use this. But as we onboard more clients working with Azure Storage/Data Lake/Data Warehouse I see some big operational gains for us.<p>Here's hoping we see similar developments across the other major cloud providers. Very impressed with Azure's development in the last 3 years!
What's really got me excited lately is the combination of Ansible (for dirty work) and container orchestration systems like Kubernetes/Rancher/etc (also, tools that go from one orchestrated host to many like dokku and flynn).<p>While I appreciate the competition from GCE and Azure, what I really want is a tool that will run in any one of their clouds, but offers the same ease-of-management, and lets me go from one cloud to another or to a private cloud without breaking a sweat. I want the competition to be 70% on price and 20% on added-management-value and 10% on bundled services.<p>Terraform is basically this tool, but I want an even easier interface, terraform still feels somewhat too specific to me -- I don't want to even have to write config or specify some "aws" adapter that will make my config work on some provider. I want instant, multi-cloud (possibly) heroku, using only the network, hard-drive-space, ram, and lxc "primitives".<p>Someone (maybe me if I ever find time) just needs to get to work making F/OSS versions of all the bundled tech (ex. blob storage, cloud function runners, dynamically configurable DNS resolvers, simple alerting, etc) that runs in a container, and then the question just becomes "where can I get the cheapest most performant VPS that will host my containers".
What's nice about this is the directness of it.<p>As far as I understand, with services like AWS ECS you need to provision the infrastructure first and pay for its uptime, whereas this allows more ephemeral containers to be run with minimal setup, and you only pay for the compute time used<p>Would only be useful for short lived jobs, but a really nice idea none the less.
"Each container deployed is securely isolated from other customers using proven virtualization technology. "<p>Does anybody know if they mentioned anywhere what they use? LXC or Jails? Or some homegrown stuff?
I would like it if the major cloud providers implemented microsecond boot and teardown times for instances along with suitable pricing.<p>Unikernels and a whole zoo of other types of tiny operating systems would be enabled by this.<p>I'm not a fan of containers - I feel they are reimplementing much of the operating system infrastructure within the OS at the price of high and unnecessary complexity.<p>It's frustrating that cloud computing has so many benefits, but at another level we must wait and hope that Amazon Google and Microsoft are willing to implement new architectures such as microsecond level boot and teardown.
Does anyone know what service discovery, network security policy and ability to add multiple redundant copies of the same service this offers?<p>I'm guessing it's powered heavily by kubernetes, so maybe that answers the question, but I'd be interested to know more about the details.
This doesn't seem cheap
>> £0.001 Core per second
That works out at over £2500 for a <i>single</i> core running for a month. And thats without memory costs etc...
While it sounds cool i'm a bit dismayed by the naming choice as ACI in my head is short for the Application Container Image format as used by CoreOS and appc.
I find it funny to see containers landing in Windows. While I fully approve the containers on Linux, to me it looks like Windows does not really need them: it already has a stable notion of executable files with full binary compatibility. An old but gold EXE format is your container. Please excuse my probable naivety, but am I missing something?
Pretty awesome this can be done in one command. At Kyso we deploy a lot of data-science images to GCP, it can be tricky.<p>Is the API support for this coming?