Getting to know containers in the Azure landscape

You aren’t reading this book because you want to run containers on Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or on-premises. You’re reading this because you are interested in the container landscape on Microsoft Azure. Let’s take a look at that!

Microsoft Azure provides different technologies that support running container-based workloads. Each technology fits different use cases and has different behavior, and it’s important that you select the right technology for the task at hand. There is no right or wrong solution; some are fit to run on enterprise-grade technologies such as Azure Kubernetes Service and some will do just fine on Azure App Service for containers. However, if you are a software company, it is unlikely that your solution is going to remain the same over several years. Business goals change, software architectures change, and public clouds change. Knowing what your options are, when to migrate, or when to reconsider a specific technology are key to successfully running containers in Microsoft Azure.

In this book, we will discuss, explain, and show multiple Azure container technologies and elaborate on their use cases. Let’s briefly introduce these technologies:

• Azure App Service for containers
• Azure Functions for containers
• Azure Container Instances
• Azure Container Apps
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Azure Container Registry

We will provide a brief overview of each technology in the next section and help you understand what they do and why.