However, the billing model is complex, with three elements making up the charge. First, there’s a flat fee of $0.0025 per request for creating a container instance.

Azure Container Instances (ACI), which let you create Linux and Windows containers without having to manage the virtual machines they run on, are now generally available. ACI brings serverless ...

As Microsoft stresses, these containers are first-class objects on Azure and get all of the same role-based access controls, billing tags and other features that you’d expect on the platform.

Azure will also support Docker’s open orchestration APIs, so that developers will be able to create a multi-container Dockerized application.