Exercise - Control restart behavior

Completed

The ease and speed of deploying containers in Azure Container Instances makes it a great fit for executing run-once tasks like image rendering or building and testing applications.

With a configurable restart policy, you can specify that your containers are stopped when their processes have completed. Because container instances are billed by the second, you're charged only for the compute resources used while the container executing your task is running.

What are container restart policies?

Azure Container Instances has three restart-policy options:

Restart policy	Description
Always	Containers in the container group are always restarted. This policy makes sense for long-running tasks like a web server. This setting is the default applied when no restart policy is specified at container creation.
Never	Containers in the container group are never restarted. The containers run one time only.
OnFailure	Containers in the container group are restarted only when the process executed in the container fails (when it terminates with a nonzero exit code). The containers are run at least once. This policy works well for containers that run short-lived tasks.

Run a container to completion

To see the restart policy in action, create a container instance from the azuredocs/aci-wordcount container image and specify the OnFailure restart policy. This container runs a Python script that analyzes the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet, writes the 10 most common words to standard output, and then exits.

1. Run this az container create command to start the container:

   az container create \
     --resource-group learn-deploy-aci-rg \
     --name mycontainer-restart-demo \
     --image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-wordcount:latest \
     --restart-policy OnFailure \
     --location eastus
   

   Azure Container Instances starts the container and then stops it when its process (a script, in this case) exits. When Azure Container Instances stops a container whose restart policy is Never or OnFailure, the container's status is set to Terminated.

2. Run az container show to check your container's status:

   az container show \
     --resource-group learn-deploy-aci-rg \
     --name mycontainer-restart-demo \
     --query "containers[0].instanceView.currentState.state"
   

   Repeat the command until it reaches the Terminated status.

3. Run az container logs to view the container's logs to examine the output:

   az container logs \
     --resource-group learn-deploy-aci-rg \
     --name mycontainer-restart-demo
   

   You get this output:

   [('the', 990),
    ('and', 702),
    ('of', 628),
    ('to', 610),
    ('I', 544),
    ('you', 495),
    ('a', 453),
    ('my', 441),
    ('in', 399),
    ('HAMLET', 386)]