Category Archives: azure

Speaking at Conf24 about Azure Container Apps

I was accepted to speak at Conf24 conference on cloud native topics. My talk is about exploring Azure Container Apps as serverless container option in Microsoft Azure and how it works behind the scenes, going from basic examples to more advanced by deploying a web application, connected to REST / background service, configuring secret management, scaling and Dapr integration.

Short gist of the talk

Kubernetes is becoming de facto community standard for running container workloads on a scale. Setting up and maintaining Kubernetes is not an easy task to do, let alone focus on the efficient workloads by following all the best practices in cloud native area. Azure Container App brings the best of Kubernetes with cloud best practices applied without handling the Kubernetes beast behind the scenes. It gives developers and IT pros the time to focus on the workload, by giving them tools to focus on the fully managed experience for them and their customers.

What I focused on in the talk is to provide:

  1. information about what Azure Container Apps is
  2. information how they work with practical examples
  3. use ingress and limit traffic internally or externally
  4. show the use of Dapr and how to provide an efficient way to authenticate to other Azure Services

Slides and code

Slides are available here, code is provided here.

To follow along with code, you’ll need:

  1. an active Azure subscription – MSDN or trial or Azure Pass is fine – you can also do all of the work in Azure Shell (all tools installed) and by using Github Codespaces
  2. Azure CLI installed to work with Azure or Azure PowerShell module installed
  3. PowerShell installed – we do recommend an editor like Visual Studio Code to be able to write scripts, YAML pipelines and connect to repos to submit changes.
  4. [OPTIONAL] Windows Terminal

If you will be working on your local machines, you will need to have:

  1. Powershell installed
  2. git installed – instructions step by step here
  3. .NET installed to run the application if you want to run it locally
  4. SQL server to install the database and to populate it with data
  5. an editor (besides notepad) to see and work with code, yaml, scripts and more (for example Visual Studio Code)

How to run and structure of the demos are available on readme file here.

ITS demo web app

Conclusion

Preparing the demos and slides for this talk was fun and challenging at the same time. I tried to provide simple explanations about the solution and give users an idea how to use it in their apps without changing the app itself.