Azure Container Instances disk space pricing

Question

This doesn't seem to be listed neither on the Microsoft portals, or be answered anywhere else - so I might have misunderstood how this is provisioned and/or calculated in Azure, but;

Instancing a container instance in Azure, with an image from my Azure Container Registry, how is disk space billed? I understand the whole memory/CPU billed-by-the-second, but what about the disk space taken up by the running instance?

The official docs seems to be very vague about this.

Chillon

Answer 1

When an Azure Container Instance is launched it has an amount of disk space available to the container. You have no control over this and are not explicitly charged for it.

Having just ran this command

az container create --image node:8.9.3-alpine -g "Test1" \
  -n test1 --command-line 'df -h'

The response shows...

Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
overlay                  48.4G      2.8G     45.6G   6% /
tmpfs                   958.9M         0    958.9M   0% /dev
tmpfs                   958.9M         0    958.9M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1                48.4G      2.8G     45.6G   6% /dev/termination-log
tmpfs                   958.9M      4.0K    958.9M   0% /var/aci_metadata
/dev/sda1                48.4G      2.8G     45.6G   6% /etc/resolv.conf
/dev/sda1                48.4G      2.8G     45.6G   6% /etc/hostname
/dev/sda1                48.4G      2.8G     45.6G   6% /etc/hosts
shm                      64.0M         0     64.0M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                   958.9M         0    958.9M   0% /proc/kcore
tmpfs                   958.9M         0    958.9M   0% /proc/timer_list
tmpfs                   958.9M         0    958.9M   0% /proc/timer_stats
tmpfs                   958.9M         0    958.9M   0% /proc/sched_debug

So you should have 48gb of disk space to play with.

(I tried to test this with a Win Image, but got hit by a bug trying to get the information out)

Sjoberg

Thank you for the clarification. I noticed that there was a huge amount of disk space allocated to the instances by default (without choosing an persistent disk), and was interested in how that might get charged. – Southland