I find Azure Container Instances (ACI) very confusing. In Azure Container Apps, if there are no requests, the service scales down to zero and stops billing. However, does ACI also have such a feature?
For example, if I deploy a container that is called once a month, and each call takes 5 seconds to complete, will I be charged for the 5 seconds or for every second in the month for which it was deployed/available?
How can I stop/pause ACI to only bill for the 5 seconds used?
I know that is not a strictly programming question, so I appreciate that this may not be the best forum to ask, but I am unsure where else to post this.
Thank you in advance!
2
Answers
I realized that ACI is not the solution that should be used for such a workload. ACI is meant to run tasks like compiling apps, not for servers that wait for a client to request something.
You can use Azure Automation or logic app to stop/start containers in ACI but that’s extra work on your part to implement that. In your scenario if you want to only pay for what you use and then the best options are
Your best bet (apart from going to the full-blown AKS, for which you still need to pay for the minimum 1 node required) here is to run this workload in Azure Container Apps and scale to 0 when there is no traffic and pay for only when you have traffic.
Currently Azure Container Apps supports HTTP, but TCP is coming very soon https://github.com/microsoft/azure-container-apps/issues/375