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Back in May we announced the partnership between Docker and Microsoft to make it easier to deploy containerized applications from the Desktop to the cloud with Azure Container Instances (ACI). Then in June we were able to share the first version of this as part of a Desktop Edge release, this allowed users to use existing Docker CLI commands straight against ACI making getting started running containers in the cloud simpler than ever.
We are now pleased to announce that the Docker and ACI integration has moved into Docker Desktop stable 2.3.0.5 giving all Desktop users access to the simplest way to get containers running in the cloud.
Getting started
As a new starter, to get going all you will need to do is upgrade your existing Docker Desktop to the latest stable version (2.3.0.5), store your image on Docker Hub so you can deploy it (you can get started with Hub here) and then lastly you will need to create an ACI context to deploy it to. For a simple example of getting started with ACI you can see our initial blog post on the edge experience.
More CLI commands
We have added some new features since we first released the Edge experience, one of the biggest changes was the addition of the new docker volume command. We added this in as we wanted to make sure that there was an easy way to get started creating persistent state between spinning up your containers. It is always good to use a dedicated service for a database like Cosmo DB, but while you are getting started volumes are a great way to initial store state.
This allows you to use existing and create new volumes, to get started with a new volume we can start by selecting our ACI context:
$ docker context use myaci
Then we can create a volume in a similar way to the Docker CLI, though in this case we have a couple of cloud specific variables we do need to provide:
$ docker volume create --storage-account mystorageaccount --fileshare test-volume
Now I can use this volume either from my CLI:
docker run -v mystorageaccount/test-volume:/target/path myimage
Or from my Compose file:
myservice:
image: nginx
volumes:
- mydata:/mount/testvolumes
volumes:
mydata:
driver: azure_file
driver_opts:
share_name: test-volume
storage_account_name: mystorageaccount
Along with this the CLI now supports some of the most popular CLI commands that were previously missing including stop, start & kill.
Try it out
If you are after some ideas of what you can do with the experience you can check out Guilluame’s blog post on running Minecraft in ACI, the whole thing takes about ~15 minutes and is a great example of how simple it is to get containers up and running.
Microsoft offers $200 of free credits to use in your first 30 days which is a great way to try out the experience, once you have an account you will just need Docker Desktop and a Hub repo with your images saved in and you can start deploying!
To get started today with the new Azure ACI experience, download Docker Desktop 2.3.0.5 and try out the experience yourself. If you enjoy the experience, have feedback on it or other ideas on what Docker should be working on please reach out to us on our Roadmap.