Azure Container Instances (ACI) is a managed service that allows you to run containers directly on the Microsoft Azure public cloud, without requiring the use of virtual machines (VMs). With Azure Container Instances, you don’t have to provision underlying infrastructure or use higher-level services to manage containers. ACI provides basic capabilities for managing a group of containers on a host machine. It supports the use of full container orchestrators like Kubernetes for more advanced tasks like coordinated upgrades, service discovery and automated scaling.