Building Multi-Architecture Container Images

Introduction

Over the past several years, we’ve seen the emergence of the ARM64 architecture, which is gaining popularity due to its energy efficiency and performance benefits. We often seen these processors in mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. We also seen them in our IoT devices, such as smartwatches and smart TVs. Now, we are starting to see increased adoption of ARM64 processors in servers and personal computers.

This emergence of the ARM64 architecture, means that we now have two major processor architectures to consider when building and deploying our containerized applications in order to maximize our application’s reach.

Does Workload Identity on AKS work across tenants?

Introduction

An interesting use case for Workload Identity came up recently. I was asked if a Pod in an AKS cluster that was deployed in one tenant can access Azure resources within another tenant.

I’ve configured Workload Identity on AKS many times, and I thought “in theory” it should “just work”, but I never tested it across tenants. So I decided to give it a try.

TL;DR: Yes, it does work.

Streamline Network Observability on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide to enable the AKS add-on with Terraform

Have you ever had to troubleshoot network issues in your Kubernetes clusters? If so, you know how challenging it can be to identify and resolve problems.

To troubleshoot network issues you probably had to use a combination of tools like kubectl, tcpdump, wireshark, and netstat. The list goes on and on… While these tools are great for debugging and capturing network logs and traces, they don’t provide a holistic view of your cluster’s network traffic.

Efficient Configuration Management in AKS: Integrating Azure App Configuration for Seamless Loading of Key-Value Pairs into Config Maps

Did you know that Azure App Configuration Service is a managed service that helps you centralize your application configuration? It provides a way to store all your app configs in one place and manage them centrally. It also provides a way to manage feature flags and control feature rollouts. I highlighted the feature management capabilities in a breakout session the Microsoft Build conference a few weeks ago. If you have not watched the session yet, you can find the recording here

Effortlessly Deploy to Azure Kubernetes with Open Source Tools Draft and Acorn

UPDATE On March 15, 2024 Acorn Labs announced that they will be shifting focus to developing an LLM app platform based on GPT-Script technology and has archived the Acorn Runtime project.

In this post, I’ll walk you through deploying a web application to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) without having to write any Docker or Kubernetes manifest files.

Using open-source command-line tools Draft and Acorn, we’ll containerize and deploy to AKS in just a few steps! Let’s go 🚀

Service Mesh Considerations

“Build microservices”, they said… “it’ll be fun”, they said…

There are many reasons why you would want to deploy a solution based on the microservices architectural pattern, but it comes at a cost. More microservices means more deployments to manage, more microservices to connect, more microservices to secure… yeah, it gets complex real quick.

If you’re just getting started with microservices or have a small number of microservices deployed, you may have heard of the term “service mesh”, but not needed one yet.

Re-visiting Dev Container Features

A few months ago I wrote a post that described how you can add custom features to your Dev Containers. That didn’t age very well 😅

But good news is that there is a better way to add or extend functionality for your Dev Containers. 🥳

Since my original post, @BrigitMurtaugh published a post on the VS Code blog announcing new repos, the open dev container specification and discussed a new way of adding features. If you haven’t read the post, go check it out here.