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(Azure Container Instance engineer here) This looks very similar to what we launched with Azure Container Instances last summer. The Azure Container Instances

(Azure Container Instance engineer here) This looks very similar to what we launched with Azure Container Instances last summer. The Azure Container Instances kubernetes connector is open source and available here: https://github.com/Azure/aci-connector-k8s https://github.com/Azure/aci-connector-k8s

curiousDog 9y ago
Wow this looks like an exact copy of Azure Container Instances.
- pbecotte 9y ago
  Which is an exact copy of the Joyent service from the year before :)
  - zenlikethat 9y ago
    You mean Triton? I wouldn’t really call it an exact copy if so. There was a whole Linux syscall translation layer in there...
    - elcritch 9y ago
      Copy in the sense of the product features, not the product implementation. Joyent has long provided a "run your container as a service" which IMHO is the best way for a small/medium to run container services. The whole create VM's to run containers creates a lot of extra work. Plus this could be great for teams doing data analysis, just spin up 100 containers for 30 seconds type of workloads. The OP is short on details anyways, does Fargate run on a tuned xen vm's or do they have linux servers under there (or maybe they're SmartOS ;) ).
- azinman2 9y ago
  Or just the general idea of a cloud provider making it easy to run containers. That’s not exactly a left-field idea.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Exactly this. I think this is pretty much the use case most people envision when they think about a container orchestration service (it was for me, anyway). My understanding is that EC2 and friends didn't deliver this on day 0 because efficient container isolation is hard.
christop 9y ago
Yeah, looks very similar. I will be interested to see how quickly containers can be provisioned on FarGate. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but my experience so far with ACI is that it consistently took about three to four minutes until a smallish container was ready for use.
- bdburns 9y ago
  What image were you running? Our internal monitoring indicates that it is generally significantly faster than that, but image pull is almost always the long pole for container startup time.
johnnycarcin 9y ago
Came here to post this. To me it shows the gap between Azure and the non-enterprise world. Azure did this awhile back, as well as the managed k8s thing, neither of which got much run on HN. Perhaps Azure needs to work on marketing? Is there a legitimate reason Azure isn't getting more traction in the non-enterprise world? I mean that as a totally serious question, not in a dickish way. Is it because it has the Microsoft name attached to it or just because AWS has so much traction? As always, full disclosure that I work at MSFT as well.
- adventured 9y ago
  > Is it because it has the Microsoft name attached to it or just because AWS has so much traction? Yes on both counts. Also, the perception is common that Microsoft = Windows Server, to a very high degree of bias. Thus, if you don't operate on that platform, you'd immediately disregard Azure. A lot more work is needed to convince non-Windows operations & developers to buy into Microsoft's offerings around Linux. Emphasis that that says nothing about the quality of existing offerings, rather, the issue is of perception. The perception is that Linux is and will always be a secondary concern with Microsoft; and potentially worse, skepticism over whether Microsoft will invest into and support Linux over the very long term. If one buy into that skepticism or doubts Microsoft's commitment to Linux, AWS is immediately a superior choice as a long-term platform bet.
- 7ewis 9y ago
  We run AWS, GCP and Azure. Devs in my team can pretty much chose their favourite cloud to deploy things to. Everyone always picks AWS, it's just the easiest to navigate and feels like everything links together well. I think the only things we use Azure for is the Directory, and Functions to run some PowerShell. As AWS is the industry standard, I feel that a lot of people like to stick with what they know too.
  - jcims 9y ago
    I'm in the unfortunate position of being curious about the one thing that folks are best advised not to share, your security/compliance stack. Based on what I've seen to date, nothing handles all three equally well, but I'm curious if you've found anything that gets close.
shaklee3 9y ago
I think you're definitely underselling your title if you are who I think you are :)
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  >Today’s post is by Brendan Burns, Partner Architect, at Microsoft & Kubernetes co-founder.

curiousDog 9y ago

Wow this looks like an exact copy of Azure Container Instances.

pbecotte 9y ago
Which is an exact copy of the Joyent service from the year before :)
- zenlikethat 9y ago
  You mean Triton? I wouldn’t really call it an exact copy if so. There was a whole Linux syscall translation layer in there...
  - elcritch 9y ago
    Copy in the sense of the product features, not the product implementation. Joyent has long provided a "run your container as a service" which IMHO is the best way for a small/medium to run container services. The whole create VM's to run containers creates a lot of extra work. Plus this could be great for teams doing data analysis, just spin up 100 containers for 30 seconds type of workloads. The OP is short on details anyways, does Fargate run on a tuned xen vm's or do they have linux servers under there (or maybe they're SmartOS ;) ).
azinman2 9y ago
Or just the general idea of a cloud provider making it easy to run containers. That’s not exactly a left-field idea.
- weberc2 9y ago
  Exactly this. I think this is pretty much the use case most people envision when they think about a container orchestration service (it was for me, anyway). My understanding is that EC2 and friends didn't deliver this on day 0 because efficient container isolation is hard.

christop 9y ago

Yeah, looks very similar. I will be interested to see how quickly containers can be provisioned on FarGate. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but my experience so far with ACI is that it consistently took about three to four minutes until a smallish container was ready for use.

bdburns 9y ago
What image were you running? Our internal monitoring indicates that it is generally significantly faster than that, but image pull is almost always the long pole for container startup time.

johnnycarcin 9y ago

Came here to post this. To me it shows the gap between Azure and the non-enterprise world. Azure did this awhile back, as well as the managed k8s thing, neither of which got much run on HN. Perhaps Azure needs to work on marketing? Is there a legitimate reason Azure isn't getting more traction in the non-enterprise world? I mean that as a totally serious question, not in a dickish way. Is it because it has the Microsoft name attached to it or just because AWS has so much traction? As always, full disclosure that I work at MSFT as well.

adventured 9y ago
> Is it because it has the Microsoft name attached to it or just because AWS has so much traction? Yes on both counts. Also, the perception is common that Microsoft = Windows Server, to a very high degree of bias. Thus, if you don't operate on that platform, you'd immediately disregard Azure. A lot more work is needed to convince non-Windows operations & developers to buy into Microsoft's offerings around Linux. Emphasis that that says nothing about the quality of existing offerings, rather, the issue is of perception. The perception is that Linux is and will always be a secondary concern with Microsoft; and potentially worse, skepticism over whether Microsoft will invest into and support Linux over the very long term. If one buy into that skepticism or doubts Microsoft's commitment to Linux, AWS is immediately a superior choice as a long-term platform bet.
7ewis 9y ago
We run AWS, GCP and Azure. Devs in my team can pretty much chose their favourite cloud to deploy things to. Everyone always picks AWS, it's just the easiest to navigate and feels like everything links together well. I think the only things we use Azure for is the Directory, and Functions to run some PowerShell. As AWS is the industry standard, I feel that a lot of people like to stick with what they know too.
- jcims 9y ago
  I'm in the unfortunate position of being curious about the one thing that folks are best advised not to share, your security/compliance stack. Based on what I've seen to date, nothing handles all three equally well, but I'm curious if you've found anything that gets close.

shaklee3 9y ago

I think you're definitely underselling your title if you are who I think you are :)

bob_theslob646 9y ago
>Today’s post is by Brendan Burns, Partner Architect, at Microsoft & Kubernetes co-founder.