Virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances

This article introduces how virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances (ACI) enable you to orchestrate containerized workloads. This article provides background about the feature set, availability, and resources.

Virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances allow you to deploy pods in your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster that run as container groups in ACI. Since virtual nodes are backed by ACI's serverless infrastructure, you can quickly scale up your workload without needing to wait for the Kubernetes cluster autoscaler to deploy VM compute nodes. You can rapidly scale your application workloads and only pay for the time that your pods are running.

Virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances is an evolution on the existing virtual nodes offering for AKS. It offers significantly better support for Kubernetes functionality, removing most of the limitations of the prior implementation.

Features of virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances

Rapidly scale your application workloads

Pods deployed in a virtual node run on ACI's serverless infrastructure. You don't need to first provision additional VM compute nodes in your AKS cluster when scaling up your workload.

Only pay per second of execution time

With standard AKS cluster nodes, you pay for provisioned VMs even if you are not actively utilizing their capacity. Pods in a virtual node use ACI's per-second billing, so you pay based on what you need.

Region availability

Virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances is supported in all regions where ACI is available. Virtual nodes on confidential Azure Container Instances is supported in all regions where confidential ACI is available.

For more information, see Resource availability & quota limits for ACI.

Resources

Next steps

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