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

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 🚀 Pre-requisites Before you begin, make sure you have access to an Azure Subscription. You will also need to have the following tools installed on your machine. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading