Progressive Delivery on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide using Flagger with Istio and FluxCD

In my previous post, we setup an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster to automatically update images based on new image tags in a container registry. As soon as a new image was pushed to the registry the image was immediately updated.

But what if you don’t want an agent automatically pushing out new images without some sort of testing? 🤔

In this article, we’ll build upon Flux’s image update automation capability and add Flagger to implement a canary release strategy.

Automating Image Updates with FluxCD on AKS

In my previous post, we walked through the setup of FluxCD on AKS via AKS extensions. In this article, we’ll go a bit deeper and take a look at how you can use FluxCD to automate image updates in your AKS cluster.

The goal here is to streamline the process of updating your application deployments in your cluster.

Here is our intended workflow:

1. Modify application code, then commit and push the change to the repo.
2. Create a new release in GitHub which kicks off a release workflow to build and push an updated container image to a GitHub Container Registry.
3. FluxCD detects the new image and updates the image tag in the cluster.
4. FluxCD rolls out the new image to the cluster.

We’ll use same AKS store demo app we used in the previous post, but this time we’ll go a bit faster.

Git going with GitOps on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide using FluxCD AKS Extension

In reading through @StevenMurawski’s blog post titled, What Really is GitOps? we learned that GitOps is a way to do Continuous Delivery of our applications on Kubernetes.

In this post, I will jump right into how you can “git” going with GitOps by enabling the FluxCD AKS Extension on your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and using a tool called Kustomize to help with Kubernetes configuration management.

We’ll deploy my new favorite demo app, AKS Store Demo to our AKS cluster and then make some changes to the application and see how FluxCD handles them.

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 🚀