Building and Scaling Azure Container Apps

Azure Container Apps Features

• Fully managed serverless container service for building and deploying modern apps at scale.
• Write code using your preferred programming language or framework, and build microservices with full support for Distributed Application Runtime (DAPR)
• Scale dynamically based on HTTP traffic or events powered by Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA).

Pre-requisites

• Completion of Module 1
• Completion of Module 2
• Following variables are set (from Moule 2):
  • rg_name
  • monitor_connection_string

Setup

• install the Azure Container Apps extension for the CLI

az extension add --name containerapp
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.App

• set the following environment variables

CONTAINERAPPS_ENVIRONMENT="order"
app_location=eastus2

Create Azure Container Apps Environment

az containerapp env create \
  --name $CONTAINERAPPS_ENVIRONMENT \
  --resource-group $rg_name \
  --location $app_location

Create a container app

az deployment group create --resource-group "$rg_name" \
  --template-file tools/deploy/module5/order-processor-app.json \
  --parameters \
    environment_name="$CONTAINERAPPS_ENVIRONMENT" \
    queue_connection_string="$monitor_connection_string" \
    location="$app_location"  

Scaling Container App with Azure Load Testting (ALT)

• In Module2 ALT was set up to publish messages to ASB queue to scale the demo app.
• For this module, we just need to re-run the same test, and observe scaling of the pod on virtual nodes
• On Azure Load Testing portal page, in Test menu, select the test script that was created in Module 2, and click run
• At the bottom of Run Review dialog box, click Run

Observing Scaling of Container App

• Wait until test status shows “Executing”
• On Azure Portal, search of Container Apps
• On Container Apps home page, select Metrics from left hand menu
• On the new chart set up, select CPU Usage Nanocores under Metric dropdown
• Set the time range to Last 30 minutes
• on the selected chart, select “Add Filter”
• Under the Property dropdown select Replica
• Under the Values, you will see multiple replicas of order-processor listed
• select one or more replicas to see their CPU usage as they consume messages inserted in the orders queue by ALT

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