Run Elasticsearch image on Azure Container Instances

Last week I was moving a Docker application to Azure Container Instances. The application consisted out of 3 containers and one of them was using the official image of Elasticsearch:

FROM docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:5.3.0 

Unlucky the container was failing to start, giving the following error:

max virtual memory areas vm.max_map_count [65530] is too low, increase to at least [262144] 

After a quick search, I found this post where someone else was having the same problem.

I did some attempts to give more memory and CPU to the container, but it didn’t solve the problem because it needs changes at the host.

Azure Container Instances (ACI) is a serverless docker hosting environment (not an orchestrator!), I call it Pod as a Service, there’s no way to change or tweak things at host level.

Solution#

On the Docker Hub there are other elasticsearch images available, and finally I got it working on ACI using:

FROM elasticsearch:5.6.14-alpine