Choosing Between Microsoft’s Many Container Options: 2024 Edition

• Azure supports numerous container hosting and orchestration options which require application architects to examine what they truly need. 
• While some options enable rapid deployment and simplified management, others offer greater scalability but incur more cost and complexity.
• Microsoft has extended several of its container options to the edge, where services can host applications requiring low-latency or have regulatory requirements.
• Container options, even from Microsoft, are overwhelmingly focused on Linux workloads, with support for Windows Server containers lagging behind.

Containers and management of container-based applications via Kubernetes orchestration (now a de-facto standard) can improve application efficiency and performance but can be complex to deploy and maintain. Microsoft offers a number of environments to host and orchestrate container-based workloads, each of which has advantages for specific application scenarios and use cases. This report suggests which technologies are appropriate for which use cases. (See the chart “Summary of Microsoft Container Offerings.”)