Azure User Group Norway

We're delighted to welcome you to our February virtual lunch. On the menu for today we have a four courses of Azure container runtimes, delivered by chef Mohit Sharma.

This session demystifies Azure’s container ecosystem by providing a use-case-driven overview of the major services that support containers, including Azure Container Registry, Azure Container Instances, App Service for Containers, Azure Container Apps, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure App Configuration. Rather than focusing on deep technical implementation details, the session emphasizes how these services differ, what problems they are designed to solve, and when each service is the best fit, particularly in terms of how much infrastructure is abstracted away and what level of troubleshooting and operational insight each platform provides.

To ground the discussion in real behavior, the session includes a focused demo built around a single container image. The image is created once, stored in Azure Container Registry, and then deployed to multiple Azure container platforms to show how the same application behaves across services with different abstraction levels. The demo and discussion highlight how increasing abstraction simplifies operations while changing the way teams monitor, debug, and troubleshoot applications.

Attendees can expect to see a series of concise demos, including:

Build once, run everywhere: A single container image pushed to Azure Container Registry and reused across platforms

Azure Container Instances: Launching a container in seconds to demonstrate minimal abstraction, limited diagnostics, and fast execution

App Service for Containers: Running the same image with built-in HTTPS, logging, and platform-managed troubleshooting

Azure Container Apps: Demonstrating scale-to-zero, revision management, and managed observability for microservices

Azure Kubernetes Service (overview): Inspecting pods and deployments to illustrate deep control, rich troubleshooting, and increased operational responsibility

Azure App Configuration: Externalizing configuration and feature flags and changing application behavior live without rebuilding or redeploying containers

These demos are intentionally brief and visual, reinforcing the discussion around trade-offs, abstraction levels, and troubleshooting capabilities, rather than diving into platform-specific implementation details.

By the end of the session, attendees will have a clear mental model of Azure’s container services, an understanding of the balance between abstraction, control, and observability, and a practical decision framework to confidently choose the right Azure container platform for their applications.