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.

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.

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.”