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In distributed architectures, we’ll usually have a number of independent stateless services that serve a purpose (set around a domain, such as ordering items, storing items in a catalog, handling authentication etc.) While services should strive to be stateless, there will be some services that need to track state in order to fufil a business operation or function. Dapr has a state management build block that simplifies state tracking and enables you to store state across a variety of data stores. ...

About mid-April, the Azure Container Apps team announced a public preview of a new hosting plan and pricing structure for hosting your Container Apps. By default, there was a Serverless consumption hosting plan which you can use to host your Container Apps. This provided support for scale-to-zero scenarios and you’d only pay for resources that your application would use. With the Dedicated hosting plan now in preview, you still have the option of having a fully managed environment for hosting your Container Apps with scale-to-zero capabilities, but in addition to this you can also run applications with customized hardware using Dedicated workload profiles. ...

What are virtual networks? As you look to move workloads to the cloud, it’s important to have a secure and scalable network infrastructure that can support your applications. In Azure, this is where virtual networks come in. Virtual networks (VNet for short) are the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. They enable many types of Azure resources to communicate with each other, the internet and on-prem networks securely. You can also use VNets to filter and route network traffic. ...

What is Log Analytics? Azure Log Analytics is a tool as part of Azure Monitor that we can use to query data stored in the Azure Monitor Logs store. As administrators or developers, we would use Log Analytics in the Azure portal to configure input data sources (such as Container Apps, App Service, Cosmos DB etc.) and then query thier Azure Monitor logs to gain insights on those resources. If you’ve worked with Azure for while, you’ve probably heard of (or even used) Log Analytics. Sending logs to Log Analytics is relatively straight forward, but many people just use Log Analytics as a dumping ground for their logs, and don’t take advantage of all its capabilities. ...

One important aspect of any web application is its availability. Azure provides many tools that ensures your application is up and running, one of them being availability tests, which allow you to periodically check the availability of your application. You can also generate alerts should your web application become unavailable. You can configure availability tests and alerts in your Bicep templates, automating the entire process! In this article, we’ll create a Bicep template that provisions all the resources that we’ll need (the web app, Application Insights instance, action groups etc.) and then disable our web application to trigger the alerts when our application is unavailable. ...