Azure Fundamentals · Lesson

Azure Container Instances

Launch a containerised application in seconds using ACI without managing servers, configure environment variables and volume mounts, and understand ACI billing.

What Is Azure Container Instances?

Azure Container Instances (ACI) is the fastest way to run a containerised workload in Azure without managing any servers or orchestrators. You provide a container image, and Azure runs it in seconds on shared, multi-tenant infrastructure. ACI is ideal for short-lived tasks, batch jobs, build agents, and event-driven workloads where spinning up a full Kubernetes cluster would be excessive overhead.

Creating a Container Instance

Launch an ACI container with a single az container create command. Specify the image, resource group, CPU, and memory. ACI pulls the image, allocates resources, and starts the container — typically within 5-10 seconds. Each container instance gets a unique fully qualified domain name (FQDN) if you assign a DNS name label, making it immediately accessible from the internet.

# Run an Nginx container accessible from the internet
az container create \
  --name my-nginx \
  --resource-group MyRG \
  --image nginx:latest \
  --cpu 1 \
  --memory 1 \
  --dns-name-label my-nginx-demo \
  --ports 80

# Access at: http://my-nginx-demo.<region>.azurecontainer.io

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