When to stop OR delete Azure Container Instance

3
votes

This is a question on general advice on the usage of ACI and its pricing calculation.

I checked the MSFT link: ACI pricing It stated that it is charged based on memory and CPU consumptions. And the calculations for my scenario is not available in the MSFT pricing calculator.

Some background studies that i did, tf I stopped/de-allocated my ACI, I should no longer be charged, but I read that a lot of tutorials actually guided us to create/delete a NEW ACI, and the start/stop functions only exist in Azure CLI.

  1. Logic-app ACI custom connector does not have start/stop functions
  2. Azure PowerShell does not have start/stop functions.

Questions: If so, what is the difference between Stopping and Deleting ACI in terms of pricing and performance?

For example:

  1. I can use Azure automation run book to call Azure CLI to stop/start my ACI.
  2. I can use Logic app - ACI custom connector to delete/create a new ACI.

Wouldn't it be faster to just stop the ACI and start again, to avoid the bandwidth cost to pull the image from Docker hub (or keeping an image in Azure container registry)? And it will be faster rather than provisioning a new instance each time.

Why the stop/start functions are not available in the Azure PowerShell module, and logic app custom connector? Seems it sounds like a better an approach to handle them.

1
azureazure-container-instances

1 Answers

2
votes

From here, I would say there is no difference. Also stopped instances should incur no cost.

When the containers are recycled, the resources are deallocated and billing stops for the container group.

This, however, also means that restarting a stopped instance will not really be faster than creating from scratch. Starting might happen on a new host, so pulling the image will need to happen again as well.