Serverless Kubernetes with Azure Container Apps

Meet the latest addition to Microsoft’s serverless offering – Azure Container Apps (ACA). Leverage scaling, resilience, and self-healing capabilities offered by Kubernetes without having the burden to manage and master Kubernetes itself. That’s the mission statement from Microsoft when it comes to ACA. But how does the new serverless runtime for containerized architectures work? What does it offer and what does not? And will developers be able to focus just on solving business requirements instead of taming the cloud infrastructure? Join this webinar by Azure MVP and cloud-native enthusiast Thorsten Hans and get your questions answered.

Transcript

1. Serverless Kubernetes
   Thorsten Hans
   @ThorstenHans
   Consultant
   With Azure Container Apps
   

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2. Consultant @ Thinktecture
   #Azure #Kubernetes
   #CloudNative #Terraform
   thorsten.hans@thinktecture.com
   thinktecture.com
   thorsten-hans.com
   @ThorstenHans
   Thorsten Hans
   

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3. What we will cover today
   o Introduction
   o Introducing Azure Container Apps
   o Running containerized workloads in Azure Container Apps
   o Provisioning, deployment, and monitoring
   o Conclusion
   Talking Points
   

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4. Do we really need another service to run
   containers in Azure?
   Yes, we do!
   

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5. Why do we need another service for containers?
   • There is no real serverless pricing for AKS (although we have cluster autoscaling and other
   features)
   • Kubernetes itself could become complex
   • It’s hard to find, and hire people that really know Kubernetes
   • Sometimes, Kubernetes is an overkill
   Introduction
   

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6. The new Azure landscape for containers
   Introduction
   Azure Kubernetes Service
   Azure WebApps for Containers Azure Container Instances Azure Container Apps
   P
   

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7. What we will cover today
   ü Introduction
   o Introducing Azure Container Apps
   o Running containerized workloads in Azure Container Apps
   o Provisioning, deployment, and monitoring
   o Conclusion
   Talking Points
   

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8. What is Azure Container Apps?
   • Serverless platform to run containerized applications
   • Customers will be charged on actual compute allocation (consumption)
   • Built on top of powerful open-source projects
   • Kubernetes
   • Envoy
   • Dapr
   • KEDA
   • Hides most of the complexicity from the customer
   Introducing Azure Container Apps
   

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9. What is Azure Container Apps?
   • In Azure Container Apps we can run different shapes of applications
   • Microservices
   • Background processing
   • Event-driven applications
   Introducing Azure Container Apps
   

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10. Building Blocks
    Introducing Azure Container Apps
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-apps/environment
    

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11. Ingress (Envoy) capabilities
    • Envoy (https://www.envoyproxy.io/) acts as Ingress controller for your workloads
    • Apps could be exposed to the internet
    • We can implement traffic split (see SMI Spec)
    • (https://github.com/servicemeshinterface/smi-spec/blob/main/apis/traffic-split/v1alpha4/traffic-split.md)
    • Apps exposed internally and hosted in the same environment, can interact with each other
    • In this case, think of regular fully qualified Kubernetes service
    Introducing Azure Container Apps
    

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12. Microservice capabilities
    • Dapr (https://dapr.io) is baked into Azure Container Apps
    • Dapr makes building Microservices easier
    • Dapr sidecars will be spinned up automatically
    • Kubernetes sidecar-pattern
    • Dapr is 100% optional! You don’t have to use Dapr if you don’t want to
    Introducing Azure Container Apps
    

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13. Scaling (KEDA) capabilities
    • Azure Container Apps is built with scalability in mind
    • KEDA (https://keda.sh) allows you to scale certain workloads based on a different scalers
    • A scaler describes scaling behavior based on external (or internal) signals e.g.:
    • Azure Service Bus Queue
    • Redis
    • Apache Kafka
    • Utilization e.g., CPU or memory
    • Scaling configuration is part of the overall deployment manifest
    Introducing Azure Container Apps
    

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14. What we will cover today
    ü Introduction
    ü Introducing Azure Container Apps
    o Running containerized workloads in Azure Container Apps
    o Provisioning, deployment, and monitoring
    o Conclusion
    Talking Points
    

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15. Running workloads in Azure Container Apps
    - Hello Azure Container Apps
    Demo
    

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16. What we will cover today
    ü Introduction
    ü Introducing Azure Container Apps
    ü Running containerized workloads in Azure Container Apps
    o Provisioning, deployment, and monitoring
    o Conclusion
    Talking Points
    

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17. How to provision Azure Container Apps
    • Azure Container Apps comes as a set of regular Azure Resource Manager entities
    • Project Bicep is the best approach to provision Azure Container Apps
    • Terraform does not support Azure Container Apps yet
    • tracked at: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm/issues/14122
    • Azure CLI integration is available via preview extension
    Provisioning, deployment, and monitoring
    

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18. How to deploy workloads to Azure Container Apps
    • Workloads must be persisted in some sort of container registry (e.g., ACR)
    • If authentication is required, credentials must be part of the deployment
    • No MSI support (yet)
    • Again, Bicep is currently the preferred way to go
    Provisioning, deployment, and monitoring
    

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19. How to monitor workloads in Azure Container Apps
    • Azure Container Apps comes with Azure Monitor integration
    • Container logs will be streamed to Log Analytics Workspace (Azure Monitor)
    • Logging agents materialize messages written to STDOUT and STDERR with contextual
    information e.g.:
    • Container App Name
    • Revision Name
    • Environment Name
    • Container Image
    • …
    Provisioning, deployment, and monitoring
    

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20. Provisioning and Deployment
    - Deploying single-container app in Azure Container Apps
    - Running a multi-container app in Azure Container Apps
    - Investigating with Azure Monitor
    Demo
    

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21. What we will cover today
    ü Introduction
    ü Introducing Azure Container Apps
    ü Running containerized workloads in Azure Container Apps
    ü Provisioning, deployment, and monitoring
    o Conclusion
    Talking Points
    P
    

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22. o Frictionless runtime for multi-container apps (essential parts of Kubernetes)
    o Probably powerful enough for many organizations
    o Overall integration with Azure Service will grow during preview
    o Azure Container Apps is a nice addition to the service landscape
    o But it is not replacement for Azure Kubernetes Service or Web Apps for Containers
    Conclusion
    

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23. o We are early in public preview
    o There is no SLA on the service and its availability
    o There are still important things missing (e.g. access to the underlying private network
    infrastructure)
    o Although Azure Container Apps can deal with sensitive values (by leveraging underlying
    Kubernetes Secrets) native integration with Azure Key Vault (Secret Store CSI Driver) is
    not there yet
    Conclusion
    

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24. Any further questions?!?!
    Thorsten Hans
    @ThorstenHans
    Consultant
    Don’t be afraid.
    Shoot your question now in person, or later at
    thorsten.hans@thinktecture.com or @ThorstenHans
    thns.io/slides
    

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