Azure Container Apps for Serverless Kubernetes

At Microsoft Ignite in November of 2021, Microsoft announced a brand-new technology: Azure Container Apps, a fully serverless, application-centric hosting offering, meaning you do not have to worry about any underlying virtual machines, orchestrators, or other cloud infrastructure.

Throughout this chapter, we will help you understand how Azure Container Apps work, how to deploy a solution based on our well-known use case, and finally, see whether it brings to the table what is promised.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Understanding Azure Container Apps
• Deploying containers to Azure Container Apps
• Pros and cons of running containers on Azure Container Apps

Understanding Azure Container Apps

As mentioned in the introduction, Azure Container Apps is a new offering from Microsoft to easily run your container-based workloads in the cloud without having to worry about underlying infrastructure and orchestration. That does not mean that it does not use either. In fact, Azure Container Apps uses AKS—it is just managed by Microsoft and not yourself.

Important note

Azure Container Apps is currently, at the time of writing this book, still in public preview. As we expect plenty of development to take place, some examples may be outdated by the time you read this. The overall concept should still hold.

Azure Container Apps also makes use of other open source software such as Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaling (KEDA) (https://keda.sh), Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) (https://dapr.io), and Envoy (https://www.envoyproxy.io/).

KEDA is used to automatically scale your workloads if you choose to. It uses a concept of scalers...

Deploying containers to Azure Container Apps

Time to see whether we can help our product manager out. Can we get our billing statements API up and running in Azure Container Apps?

As this is a preview feature, the commands we need are not yet included in the Azure CLI tools. For that, we need to add the containerapp extension. We can do that using the following command:

az extension add –name containerapp

Important note

If you are using Cloud Shell through the Azure portal, it is not necessarily required to add the az extension up front. If it is not installed, Cloud Shell will prompt you and ask whether you want to install the required extension when you try to deploy a container app for the first time.

Before we can actually deploy a new Azure Container Apps app, we need to register the Resource Provider in our subscription. Normally, we are not required to do this, but it is common with preview features. We are simply telling Microsoft Azure “Well hello...

Pros and cons of running containers on Azure Container Apps

We have seen that it is relatively easy to get started with a single container on Azure Container Apps. But of course, there are both pros and cons to using Azure Container Apps. Some of these will be explored in depth in Part 2 of this book, and some we have already discussed throughout this chapter.

Pros

Let’s start with some benefits that Azure Container Apps bring, and, surely, they are good.

Speed

Azure Container Apps is fast! Going from zero to an environment with a container running inside of it takes less than a couple of minutes and merely a few commands. If Azure Container Apps is not your production platform, it is definitely a platform to use for testing the functionality of your container in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Microservices

Yes, microservices. The way Azure Container Apps is designed, the way we can isolate environments but also have multiple containers in a single environment...

Summary

We ended the previous chapter with “What does Azure Container Apps bring to the table and does it match up with what Azure Container Instances are capable of?”. To answer that question: we think it can!

Azure Container Apps is a technology designed to make more complex infrastructures such as Kubernetes easier. As we have mentioned, AKS is the technology powering this, but the complexity is abstracted away by providing a layer on top of it: Azure Container Apps.

We have seen Azure Container Apps holds great promise for the future and will become a go-to platform for developers to get started building containerized solutions. As Azure Container Apps comes with out-of-the-box configurations for KEDA, Dapr, and Envoy (Ingress), it demands best practices to be used in code. This is a good thing.

In our pros and cons, we have seen and can easily conclude that the pros are already very good and the cons might be taken away when Azure Container Apps hits GA...