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.

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.

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.