Container technology has introduced an additional level of infrastructure abstraction, comprising the container orchestrator and container runtime environment. These components require careful and ongoing management; regardless which side of the Docker / K8s fence you sit on, Either way, the level of management needed is non-trivial.
ISVs and cloud providers have been working on ways to minimize the complexity of building and supporting a Kubernetes-based container platform (think AKS, EKS, GKE, DOKS in the cloud, MicroK8s, K3s, RKE, Gardener, OpenShift). Managed solutions in this space have proven to be very popular as they allow organizations to "outsource" management of the orchestration layer to the cloud provider in totality. Cloud providers take care of managing the "master" nodes and for maintaining/upgrading/troubleshooting the control plane components. However, with these solutions users are still responsible for correctly sizing "worker" nodes, determining how many nodes are required and for managing the deployment of applications across the platform.
Serverless containers take this abstracted management concept to a deeper level, where the cloud provider also takes care of managing the worker nodes, AND determining how to deploy your application across the environment. You simply "ask" the provider to deploy your application by providing a minimal amount of details, and the provider takes care of the rest. Azure Container Instances, and AWS Fargate for ECS/EKS are the best known providers in this space. Its important to note Serverless Containers are different from 'Functions as a Service' (eg OpenFaaS, Fargate, Azure Functions), which is another type of Serverless operating environment, but one that abstracts operations even further, by removing the need to even run an application.
Portainer includes support to deploy container based applications directly into an Azure ACI subscription, anywhere in the world. You can use Portainer to deploy your internet facing, stateless container, with Portainer orchestrating the deployment against Azure. The containers are given public IP addresses, are assigned user-defined hardware resources and support both Windows and Linux container images. With Portainer, you can deploy an ACI container in seconds, without needing to login to the Azure CLI or the complicated and at times, confusing, Azure Portal.
