implement-azure-container-apps

Azure Container Apps provide the flexibility you need with a serverless container service built for microservice applications and robust autoscaling capabilities without the overhead of managing complex infrastructure.

Contents covered

• Features/Benefits of Azure Container Apps

• Deploy container apps in azure by using azure cli

• utilize azure container apps built-in authentication and authorization

• create revisions and implement app secrets

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Azure Container Apps

These enables you to run microservices and containerized applications on a serverless platform that runs on top of azure kubernetes service.

Common uses of azure container apps include

• Deploying API endpoints

• Hosting background processing applications

• Handling event-driven processing

• Running microservices

Applications built on azure container apps can dynamically scale based on HTTP traffic, event-driven processing, CPU, or memory load

With azure container apps, user can

• run multiple container revisions and manage the container apps application lifecycle

• autoscale apps based on KEDA supported scale trigger.

• enable HTTPS ingress without having to manage other azure infrastructure

• split traffic across multiple versions of an application for Blue/Green deployments and A/B testing scenarios

• Use internal ingress and service discovery for secure internal-only endpoints with built-in DNS based service discovery

• Run containers from any registry, public, private including Docker Hub and ACR

• Use azure cli extension, azure portal, ARM templates to manage your applications

• Securely manage secrets directly in your application

• Provide an existing virtual network when creating an environment for your container apps.

• Monitor logs using azure log analytics

Container apps in the same environment are deployed in the same virtual network and write the logs to the same log analytics workspace.

Dapr Integration

When you implement a system composed of microservices, function calls are spread across the network. To support the distributed nature of microservices, you need to account for failures, retires and timeouts. While container apps features the building blocks for running microservices, use of Dapr provides an even richer microservices programming model. Dapr includes features like observability, pub/sub and service-to-service incovation with mutual TLS, retires and more.

Deployment a container app

# add azure container apps extension
az extension add --name containerapp --upgrade

# register the Microsoft.App namespace
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.App

# register the `Microsoft.OperationalInsight` provider for the azure monitor log analytics workspace if you havent used it before
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.OperationalInsights

# set env values
myRG=<resourceGroup>
myLocation=<resourceLocation>
myAppContEnv=<appEnvironment>

# create resource
az group create --name $myRG --location $myLocation

# create env
az containerapp env create --name $myAppContEnv --resource-group $myRG --location $myLocation

# create container app
az containerapp create \
    --name <containerAppName> \
    --resource-group $myRG \
    --environment $myAppContEnv \
    --image <containerImagePath> \
    --target-port <exposedPorts> \
    --ingress 'external' \  #this makes you container app available to public requests.
    --query properties.configuration.ingress.fqdn

Containers in Azure Container Apps