Article Getting started with Azure Container Apps

Azure Container Apps went General Available in May of 2022 and offers a great way to build cloud native apps with serverless containers.

Azure Container Apps behind the scenes is based on Kubernetes, it has been set up and is maintained by Microsoft. The service is setup in a serverless way where you only have to worry about deploying your apps and not have to worry about maintanance.

Features

A couple of features that can be used are:

Run Multiple container revisions
Autoscale
HTTPS ingress
Internal ingress and service discovery
Run containers from any registry
DAPR support

For a complete list of features you can visit the docs.

In the getting started example the following features are used:

HTTPS ingress
Internal ingress and service discovery
Run containers from any registry

Getting started case

Deployment of an webapplication that is public available.
Deployment of an API that is only available inside the Container Apps Network.

Steps to perform:

Create Azure Container Registry (ACR) resource
Upload API and APP image to ACR (Source code available on Github)
Create Azure Container Apps Environment
Create APP and API Container App

Prerequitites

An Azure account with an active subscription.
Azure CLI

Setup

az login
az account set --subscription <<subscriptionid>>

Install the Azure Container Apps extension for the CLI.

az extension add --name containerapp --upgrade

Register the Microsoft.App namespace, and the Microsoft.OperationalInsights provider for the Azure Monitor Log Analytics Workspace if you have not used it before.

az provider register --namespace Microsoft.App
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.OperationalInsights
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.ContainerRegistry

Setup Azure Resource group

Set a couple of variables

$RESOURCE_GROUP="rg-mycontainer-apps"
$LOCATION="westeurope"
$CONTAINERAPPS_ENVIRONMENT="my-environment"
$ACR_NAME="acrmycontainerapps01"

Create the resource group

az group create `
  --name $RESOURCE_GROUP `
  --location $LOCATION

Create an Azure Container Registry

Store custom containers in ACR to use with Azure Container Apps.

az acr create `
  --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP `
  --name $ACR_NAME `
  --sku Basic `
  --query loginServer `
  --output tsv

Upload images to ACR

Build the images and upload to ACR

$ACR_SERVER=$(az acr show -n $ACR_NAME --query loginServer -o tsv)
az acr build -r $ACR_NAME -t $ACR_SERVER/app:v1 ./azure-container-apps-demo -f ./azure-container-apps-demo/app/Dockerfile
az acr build -r $ACR_NAME -t $ACR_SERVER/api:v1 ./azure-container-apps-demo -f ./azure-container-apps-demo/api/Dockerfile

Create an Azure Container Apps environment

az containerapp env create `
  --name $CONTAINERAPPS_ENVIRONMENT `
  --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP `
  --location $LOCATION

Create containers

Create the containers in Azure Container Apps and configure with the settings:

API
- Ingress: Internal -> API is only available internally
APP
- Ingress: External -> APP is public available
- env-vars: Set the api base url in the environment settings which is used in the app to determine the url of the API

az acr update --name $ACR_NAME --admin-enabled 
$password=$(az acr credential show --name $ACR_NAME --query 'passwords[0].value' -o tsv)

az containerapp create `
  --name api1 `
  --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP `
  --environment $CONTAINERAPPS_ENVIRONMENT `
  --image $ACR_SERVER/api:v1 `
  --ingress 'internal' `
  --target-port 80 `
  --registry-server $ACR_SERVER `
  --registry-username $ACR_NAME `
  --registry-password $password `
  --query properties.configuration.ingress.fqdn
                       
$api_base_url = $(az containerapp show --name api --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --query 'properties.configuration.ingress.fqdn' -o tsv)

az containerapp create `
  --name app1 `
  --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP `
  --environment $CONTAINERAPPS_ENVIRONMENT `
  --image $ACR_SERVER/app:v1 `
  --target-port 80 `
  --ingress 'external' `
  --registry-server $ACR_SERVER `
  --registry-username $ACR_NAME `
  --registry-password $password `
  --env-vars API_BASE_URL=$api_base_url `
  --query properties.configuration.ingress.fqdn

After creating all resources you should have the following resources in azure:

You can test if the app is working by openening the app, the url of the app can be found in the settings of the container app:

The first request to the site could be slow as the default settings of this app running on 0 instances.

Resources

Container Apps azure