ACI stands for Azure Container Instance. It is a lightweight container PaaS service which allows the end customer to deploy, configure and manage a simple container-based solution based on a docker or other container image, without having to manage the underlying container cluster components. ACI can work together with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by making use of the AKS virtual nodes feature. By utilizing AKS virtual nodes, the customer can extend their AKS cluster beyond manual scaling or autoscaling with AKS native nodes, by adding one or more ACI instances as AKS virtual nodes.
