Microsoft is rapidly increasing its support for container services and launching new products to support current world requirement. However for people who are starting to learn container, it is getting a bit confusing. I have decided to summarize various services hoping that it may help you choosing the right product for your development.
Let us first discuss the various offering Microsoft has under the hood
AKS help in Creating a fully managed Kubernetes cluster. You do not need to worry about the master Orchestration. If you are familiar with K8, then this is the right choice for you.
Azure Container Instances (ACI) offers the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure, without having to provision any virtual machines and without having to adopt a higher-level service. You just need to provide the URL of the Docker Image of your application (either in Docker Hub or in local ACR) and you can start browsing your application.
Azure container registry (ACR) is a private Docker registry in Azure where you can store and manage your private Docker container images. It is not actually a container but just the repository of your container images.
Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers. It is an infrastructure platform where you can host your own microservices based application or container directly. It has its own unique way of managing the nodes and micro services. It is fully integrated with Visual studio and can run anywhere (Cloud, On-Premise or on your Laptop as well).
Azure Batch is used to run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) batch jobs efficiently in Azure. Azure Batch creates and manages a pool of compute nodes (virtual machines), installs the applications you want to run, and schedules jobs to run on the nodes.
Web App for Containers can be used to deploy and run containerised web apps that scale with your business
In a simple Table format :
| If you are looking for this… | Use This |
| Simplify the deployment, management and operations of Kubernetes | Azure Container Service (AKS) |
| Easily run containers on Azure with a single command | Container Instances |
| Store and manage container images across all types of Azure deployments | Container Registry |
| Develop microservices and orchestrate containers on Windows or Linux | Service Fabric |
| Deploy web applications on Linux using containers | App Service |
| Run repetitive compute jobs using containers | Batch |