Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability of Azure Container Instances on its cloud Wednesday, enabling developers to spin up Linux and Windows containers without needing to manage the virtual machines they run on.

The ACI service brings the benefits of the emerging “serverless computing” trend to software containers. Serverless computing was pioneered by Amazon Web Services Inc. with its Lambda service, which offloads scaling and system management operations to the cloud provider. This means developers can focus solely on their code, without being distracted by VMs, operating systems, hardware and so on. Serverless computing is also available on Microsoft Azure as “Functions.”

As for software containers, these are used by developers to package up their applications in a way that abstracts them from the underlying hardware and operating system, so they can be built once and run on any platform.

Containers already make developers’ lives much easier, but most deployments still run atop of virtual machines. So the idea of Azure Container Instances is simple – it eliminates the need to manage those VMs to simplify things further.

Corey Sanders, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Azure, said in a blog post that ACI containers can be deployed via the Azure interface or with Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration software. Users are billed according to processing time and memory usage on a per-second basis. Currently, the price is set at $0.000012 per CPU-second and $0.000004 per gigabyte-second.

The containers running on Microsoft’s ACIs are slightly different from most regular deployments. Traditional container workloads see multiple containers running on a single VM, but with ACI, Microsoft isolates each one using a hypervisor, something it said makes them more secure.

Microsoft is also providing support for Kubernetes on its ACIs through a project known as Virtual Kubelet, which also works with other serverless computing platforms. These include Amazon’s Fargate service, which seems to be the closest rival to Microsoft’s ACIs.

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