Containers

A cloud architect’s field notes on apple/container v1.2.0, for the devops engineers and application specialists who have to make the “what runs on our Macs” decision. A year ago I published Running Containers the Apple Way: A First Look into Apple Container on macOS. At the time, container was a WWDC 2025 curiosity: a Swift CLI with no stability guarantees and a limited list of things it could actually do. I was cautiously optimistic and noted, in effect, “watch this space.” ...

Optimizing Azure Container Apps Costs: Scaling to Zero, Workload Profiles, and FinOps Azure Container Apps enables teams to deploy APIs, background processors, scheduled jobs, and event-driven services without directly managing Kubernetes infrastructure. However, this convenience does not automatically ensure cost optimization. Container Apps costs depend on application behavior: the number of replicas, their active duration, the workload profile hosting them, and the telemetry or network traffic they produce. An efficient setup for an unpredictable queue worker might be wasteful for a constantly busy API, and vice versa. ...

Running Containers the Apple Way: A First Look into Apple Container on macOS For years, running containers on macOS has involved compromises. Docker Desktop used HyperKit to virtualize Linux, which was simple to use but resource-intensive. Alternatives like Rancher Desktop and OrbStack improved on this by being lighter, faster, and more developer-friendly, yet they all depended on the same core approach: emulating or virtualizing Linux within macOS. Apple has now entered this space with a native solution: Apple Container, an OCI-compliant container runtime explicitly designed for Apple Silicon and macOS 15/16 and later. It is not simply a re-skin of Docker or a clone of Lima or Colima. Instead, it represents Apple’s unique approach to how containers should operate on macOS, using the Virtualization and Network frameworks that power iOS simulators and macOS sandboxing. ...

As a cloud professional, I constantly seek ways to streamline application delivery while reducing operational overhead. Whether you’re building APIs, microservices, or event-driven backends, choosing the right platform can significantly impact speed to market and maintainability. Introducing Azure Container Apps (ACA) — a fully managed, serverless platform designed specifically for running containerized workloads without the complexity of orchestrating and managing Kubernetes infrastructure. Built on top of Kubernetes and powered by open-source technologies like Dapr and KEDA (Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaling), ACA offers the best of both worlds: the power and flexibility of containers with the simplicity and developer focus of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). ...

Rancher introduced alsmost week ago k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes Distribution. In the YouTube video below you hear Shannon Williams and Darren Shepherd from Rancher talk about K3S, what it is, the usecases and demo of K3S. https://youtu.be/5-5t672vFi4 k3sis a fully compliant, production-grade Kubernetes distribution that maintains an absolutely tiny footprint. Weighing in at less than 40 MB, it only needs 512 MB of RAM to run. This means it’s perfect for all kinds of computing that requires a minimal about of memory and space. ...