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.

Deploying ARM64 workloads to AKS

You might have heard by now that Azure has partnered with Ampere to bring ARM-based processors for virtual machines on Azure. This is super exciting as it gives you an opportunity to deploy workloads on highly performant and power efficient virtual machines and these characteristics ultimately result in excellent price-performance (lower costs 🥳)

So… are you ready to deploy your workloads to ARM64 node pools on AKS? I sure wasn’t when attempting to deploy the azure-voting-app-redis application to my cluster.

Sharing Bicep Modules with Azure Container Registry

One of the things I do as a Cloud Native Advocate at Microsoft is build end-to-end lab scenarios in the https://aka.ms/oss-labs repo. Most of the demo scenarios we aim to cover is in and around the container space and a majority of the labs uses Azure Bicep to declaratively provision Azure infrastructure. As more labs get spun up, there is a potential for redundant Bicep code. You might have already guessed, there’s a need for re-usable code to spin up AKS clusters.

Monitoring Azure Container Apps With Azure Managed Grafana

The Azure Monitor team has announced the general availability of the Azure Managed Grafana (AMG) service. As part of the announcement, they also announced the availability of curated Grafana dashboards for various Azure services including Azure Container Apps 🎉

Grafana is very popular within the Cloud Native community and it seems natural to use it for Azure Container Apps (ACA) observability.

In this post, I will walk you through provisioning the ACA and AMG resources using the Terraform AzAPI provider and show you how easy it is to import the ACA dashboards into your AMG instance.

Securely connect to your Azure Linux Virtual Machine with Tailscale SSH

Being on the Cloud Advocate team at Microsoft, we’re always looking to empower every developer to achieve more on Azure. One way of doing this is by bringing you hands-on content to deliver end-to-end scenarios using cloud-native and open source technologies.

My colleague on the Cloud Native team, Aaron Wislang has been cooking up a bunch of labs in our Azure Open Source Labs repo and one area we’ve been collaborating on is within the Azure Linux VM space.

Exploring .NET WebAssembly with WASI

Overview

WebAssembly (Wasm) is something that the Cloud Native Advocacy team has been exploring. It has been around for a few years and has mostly been used within browser-based applications. There are many blog posts on what makes WebAssembly an ideal target for running applications (e.g., smaller footprint with .wasm files compared to containers, code isolation, and sandboxing). My colleague Steven Murawski wrote a blog series on getting started with hosting Wasm apps on an emerging PaaS platform called Hippo which is developed by folks at Fermyon. In Part 1 of the series, he introduces topics and define some of the acronyms like “Wagi” and “WASI”. He also introduced a runtime called Wasmtime which implements the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) standard. This article will walk you through how Steven and I went about getting a .NET console app running as a Wasm app on the Wasmtime runtime in a Dev Container. The .NET console app produced in this article has also been contributed as a csharp template in the yo-wasm repo which is also maintained by Fermyon; so you can quickly test it out for yourself later.

Extending Visual Studio Code Dev Container Features

UPDATE: The dev-container-features-template repo referenced in this post has been archived. Please see my new post here or visit containers.dev for the latest on this topic.

Have you ever wanted to try an Azure CLI extension without having to install the extension yourself on your local machine? VSCode Dev Containers may be a good option.

What is a Dev Container?

Visual Studio Code has an extension called Remote - Containers. This extension lets you use a Docker container as a development environment and is the technology that powers GitHub Codespaces. If you don’t have the option to use Codespaces, the remote container technology also allows you to open build/open the container within your local environment as long as you have Docker Desktop,or Rancher Desktop (with dockerd as the container runtime since containerd will not work with remote containers), or Docker Engine running on your local machine.