When using Azure Container Instances (ACI) that require persistent storage, the recommended and supported storage solution is Azure Files. Azure Files provides a fully managed Server Message Block (SMB) or Network File System (NFS) file share that can be mounted by container instances at runtime.

According to Microsoft Azure Administrator documentation, Azure Files is designed for workloads that require shared, durable storage accessible by multiple compute nodes, including containers. It supports read/write persistence and maintains data durability across restarts of containers.

In this question, since the Docker image contains a Microsoft SQL Server instance, persistent and shared storage is necessary to store the database files (.mdf, .ldf). Blob, Queue, or Table storage cannot provide this functionality because:

Blob storage is for object storage (no file system mount capability).

Queue storage is for message-based communication.

Table storage is for NoSQL key-value structured data.

Azure Files allows containerized SQL Server instances to store their database files securely and persistently between container restarts or failures.