Azure Container Apps

I had a bit of time last week to do some Dapr learning, so I started to read the Dapr for .NET Developers e-book that’s available on our documentation (completely free by the way!). In one of the early chapters, the book outlines a tutorial that you can run locally to use service invocation to communicate between to two applications. Running locally is fairly straightforward, so I wanted to deploy the two applications as Container Apps, since it has support for Dapr in the platform. ...

Continuing my Microsoft Orleans learning journey, I decided to have a bit of a play around with one of their tutorials. When it comes to complex concepts or new frameworks, I like to get my hands dirty with the code to help me understand how the moving parts work together in action. In this blog post, I’ll be building my own version of the minimal Orleans app that tutorial builds and dissecting each part as I go along. Bear in mind that there are many ways to build an app, and this is just my preferred way of doing it. The idea is to break down the original tutorial and provide a bit more context as to what is going on. ...

I had a bit of spare time yesterday between customer meetings and wanted to do some coding. I’ve been hearing about Microsoft Orleans a lot on twitter and even found this Microsoft Learn module that shows you how to build your first Orleans app with ASP.NET Core 6.0. I’m a fan of distributed systems and frameworks, so I’ve wanted to get my head around Orleans for a while. For those of you who may not know, Orleans is a cross-platform framework that you can use to build distributed applications in .NET. These apps span more that just a single process using peer-to-peer communication. Orleans can scale from a single lonely on-prem server to globally distributed applications running in the cloud. It can run anywhere .NET can, including Linux, Windows and macOS. ...

Azure Container Apps is a serverless container platform that we can use to run microservices and containerized applications without having to worry about managing complex infrastructure and container orchestrations. In this video, I introduce the key concepts and features of Azure Container Apps and go through a demo on how you can create a simple Container App using Bicep. If you have any question about this video or Azure Container Apps in general, feel free to comment below or reach out to me on Twitter. ...

In a previous blog post, I talked about how we can provision an Azure Container App using Bicep and deploying our Bicep template using GitHub Actions. We’ll now turn our attention to updating the images that our Container App uses by building the new image, deploying it to Azure Container registry and then pulling the newly built image from our registry to our Container App. As part of my infrastructure deployment, I defined a container image as part of my Bicep like so: ...