Containers

A couple of years back, I built a Fitbit API token refresh service using Azure Functions. The purpose of that function was to refresh an access token that I can use to make calls to the Fitbit API and extract my own data using Azure Functions. This was before Azure Container Apps even existed, so Azure Functions was really the only option. WebJobs was an alternative (after all, Functions are essentially built on top of Azure WebJobs), but that wasn’t attractive since this was just an hobby project, and I didn’t want to break the bank. The problem with Azure Functions is that you’re restricted with the programming model. It’s fine if you just need the plumbing done for you for simple integrations, but if you want the flexibility, it’s not great. ...

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. ...

Azure Container Apps manages automatic horizontal scaling through declarative scaling rules. We can scale out our container apps based on a variety of different scalers. I recorded a video over the weekend covering how scaling works in Azure Container Apps, what KEDA is and how to set scaling rules within Azure Container Apps, using HTTP and Azure Queue storage scale rules as an example. If you prefer reading rather than watching, continue reading this post. I’ll only be covering the storage queue scaler in this post, so if you want to see how the HTTP scaler works, please watch the video. ...

In my job, I build a lot of samples that I share with customers to show them how things work. A lot of my customers are interested in Azure Container Apps, so I want to be able to provide them with samples with pre-built container images, without having to share the entire application source code as well (especially if I’ve got a bunch of basic microservices, that don’t really need to be included in the sample). ...

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. ...