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.

Web Application Routing on AKS

Exposing your web applications on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has gotten a little bit easier. In this post, I will cover the new Web Application Routing feature for AKS and discuss reasons why you may want to implement it within your cluster.

Exposing your app

You have a lot of options when it comes to exposing your application Pods to the world. If you’re using a managed-Kubernetes service in the cloud, you could deploy a Service and set the type to LoadBalancer and your cloud provider will provision one with a public IP. The Service sits in front of your Pods and if all you need is a public IP, you’re good to go.

Autoscaling Azure Container Apps

So, what makes Azure Container Apps “serverless”?

Today we are going to focus on what makes Azure Container Apps (ACA) a “serverless” offering. But what does the term “serverless” really mean? As much as we’d like to think there aren’t any servers involved, that is certainly not the case. In general, “serverless” means that most (if not all) server maintenance has been abstracted away from you.

With serverless, you don’t spend any time managing and patching servers. This concern is offloaded to Azure and you simply focus on adding business value through application delivery. In addition to operational efficiency, cost efficiency can be achieved with serverless on-demand pricing models. Your workload horizontally scales out based on need and you only pay for what you use. To me, this is serverless, and my teammate @StevenMurawski said it best… “being able to scale to zero is what gives ACA it’s serverless magic.”

Microservices Communications with Azure Container Apps

Introduction

In yesterday’s #ServerlessSeptember post, we learned what the Azure Container Apps (ACA) service is and the problems it aims to solve. It is considered to be a Container-as-a-Service platform since much of the complex implementation details of running a Kubernetes cluster is managed for you.

Some of the use cases for ACA include event-driven processing jobs and background tasks, but this article will focus on hosting microservices, and how they can communicate with each other within the ACA service. At the end of this article, you will have a solid understanding of how networking and communication is handled and will leave you with a few tutorials to try.