Compose CLI ACI Integration Now Available

Today we are pleased to announce that we have reached a major milestone, reaching GA and our V1 of both the Compose CLI and the ACI integration. 🎉

In May we announced the partnership between Docker and Microsoft to make it easier to deploy containerized applications from the Desktop to the cloud with Azure Container Instances (ACI). We are happy to let you know that all users of Docker Desktop now have the ACI experience available to them by default, allowing them to easily use existing Docker commands to deploy and manage containers running in ACI. 

As part of this I want to also call out a thank you to the MSFT team who have worked with us to make this all happen! That is a big thank you to Mike Morton, Karol Zadora-Przylecki, Brandon Waterloo, MacKenzie Olson, and Paul Yuknewicz.

Getting started with Docker and ACI 

As a new starter, to get going all you will need to do is upgrade your existing Docker Desktop to the latest stable version (2.5.0.0 or later), store your image on Docker Hub so you can deploy it (you can get started with Hub here) and then lastly you will need to create an ACI context to deploy it to. 

We have done a few blog posts now on the different types of things you can achieve with the ACI integration. 

• Getting started locally using Docker & ACI 
• Paul’s blog over at MSFT on getting started with Docker & ACI
• Deploying a Minecraft server & using volumes with ACI 
• Deploying to ACI as part of Github actions for CD 
• Docker & ACI integration into VSCode
• Dockers docs on the integration 

If you have other questions on the experience or would like some other guides then drop us a message in the Compose CLI repo so we can update our docs. 

What’s new in V1.0 

Since the last release of the CLI we have added a few new commands to make it easier to manage your working environment and also make it simpler for you to understand what you can clear up to save you money on resources you are not using.

To start we have add a volume inspect command alongside the volume create to allow you better management of your volumes: 

We are also very excited by our new top level prune command to allow you to better clear up your ACI working environment and manage your costs. 

docker prune --help

We have also added in a couple of interesting flags in here, we have the —dry-run flag to let you see what would be cleared up:

As you can see, this also lets you know the amount of compute resources you will be reclamining as well. At the end of a development session being able to do a force prune allows you to remove ‘all the things you have run’, giving you the confidence you won’t have left something running and get an unexpected bill. 

Lastly we have started to add a few more flags in based on your feedback, a couple of examples of these are the addition of the --format json and --quiet in commands ps, context ls, compose ls, compose ps, volume ls to output json or single IDs.

We are really excited about the new experience we have built with ACI, if you have any feedback on the experience or have ideas for other backends for the Compose CLI please let us know via our Public Roadmap