Azure Container Apps: Easy deployment and management of containerized applications

06/05/2023 | Blog

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed service from Azure that focuses on simplifying the deployment of applications by taking care of infrastructure configuration and management. Unlike Kubernetes, which is suitable for managing very large and complex systems with flexible configuration requirements and therefore requires a high level of expertise, Azure Container Apps is a suitable alternative for small to medium-sized systems that do not require individual settings. Azure Container Apps enables faster and easier application deployment and offers developers the opportunity to focus more on application development.

Azure Container Apps was released at the end of 2021 and is based on the container orchestration platform Kubernetes.

Azure Container Apps also offers easy deployment of containerized applications in the Azure cloud. Developers can upload their containerized applications to Azure Container Apps and then configure the container size, resource usage and other settings. The service automatically scales the number of containers to cope with demand and provides built-in security and monitoring features to protect and monitor containerized applications.

The technical implementation is as follows: Azure Container Apps provides two types of resources: a container app environment and a container app. The container apps within an environment are deployed in the same virtual network so that they can easily communicate with each other. The environment also provides a central location for writing logs to the same Log Analytics workspace. The environment can be compared to a Kubernetes namespace.

Within a container app are containerized applications that can be deployed and scaled together as a group of containers, also known as pods. The container app shares the same storage and network and can use any runtime and programming language.

Revision: By using revisions, you can create, test and deploy different versions of a container app without affecting the existing production versions.

Azure Container Apps provides two types of resources: a container app environment and a container app.

Azure Container Apps is particularly well suited to the provision and management of microservices in the cloud. This service allows developers to operate each individual microservice in its own container, which enables a high degree of flexibility and scalability. By running each container independently, microservices can be scaled separately to respond to requirements.

This example demonstrates how microservice containers can be deployed without the overhead of managing a complex infrastructure and container orchestration.

Integration with other Azure services is seamless and easy.

Azure Container Apps is a managed service in Azure, so integration with other Azure services is seamless and simple. Azure services such as Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics and Azure DevOps can be easily integrated to improve monitoring, logging and deployment of container apps.

Azure Resource Manager templates and Azure PowerShell enable automation and management of Azure Container Apps. With these tools, developers can automate recurring tasks and accelerate their application deployment, saving time and resources and increasing efficiency.

Azure Container Apps also includes the following tools:

Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime): Dapr is an open source toolkit that facilitates and accelerates the development of microservices applications. It offers a range of services that help with the development of applications, including persistence, messaging, tracing, security and more.
Ingress Controller: The Ingress Controller routes traffic to the appropriate container apps based on the hostname and path specified in the request. This allows data traffic to be managed in the applications.
KEDA (Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling): KEDA an open-source project that provides a Kubernetes-based method for automatically scaling workloads based on event-driven workloads. It integrates with Kubernetes to scale applications based on events such as queues, Kafka and other event backends. This allows you to automate the scaling of your applications as needed.

If you would like to find out more about how you can use Azure Container Apps in your project, please do not hesitate to contact our team of experts.

About the author

As a cloud software developer at M&M Software, Waldemar Hoffmann focuses on the development and implementation of scalable and reliable microservice solutions in the Azure environment. He relies on innovative technologies and proven best practices to continuously improve the efficiency, maintainability and development of systems and to optimize development processes.

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