Azure Weekly

Issue #265 - 8th March 2020

There has been a big announcement for CosmosDB this week - Azure Cosmos DB free tier is now available! We love Cosmos DB here at endjin, but have often struggled to justify the high running costs so this is very exciting news! Hopefully this pricing tier might tempt users over from Google FireBase, which offers a similarly compelling free pricing tier.

In the wider community, Bahrudin Hrnjica has written a great walkthrough of building a Predictive Maintenance Model Using ML.NET and Mohit Gupta discusses the Azure Logic Apps integration with Power BI (if you are interested in more Power BI content, why not sign up to Power BI Weekly?).

As I mentioned last week, we have some big news! For the last 9 months we've been working with Microsoft on a new learning resource; inspired by the hugely successful Azure Quickstart Templates GitHub repo, which contains over 850 examples of how to build / deploy solution on Azure using ARM Templates, we've created the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library. Containers are rapidly becoming not only the building blocks of The Cloud, but also enable those Cloud services to run on-prem and on the edge. Cloud Native Application Bundle is a protocol specifiction created by a number of organisations including Microsoft, Docker, and HashiCorp. Duffle is a tool that has been built to "exercise" the specification. Porter is an opinionated tool, built by Microsoft (via the Deis Labs team) which provides deeper integration into Azure, Helm, Kubernetes, and Terraform via mixins.

At this point, you might be thinking "so what?". We were excited to be part of this project because we saw ourselves as perfect examples of the target audience. When we first started using Azure over a decade ago, we jumped straight onto PaaS services. If that is similar to your journey, then CNAB might sound like a solution in need of a problem. However, many organisations have a journey to the cloud that looks like: physical on-prem, virtualised on-prem, IaaS in the cloud and now containers in the cloud. Much like TypeScript, which seems surplus to requirements until you understand the deficiencies in JavaScript, CNAB is a much needed standard to deal with chaos of different approaches that have emerged from the fast moving, innovative, container ecosystem. There's one futher mindset change required to fully embrace CNAB; and that's the notion that containers aren't just for hosting complex applications or micro-services. You can containerize your entire deployment; the process, the tools and their runtimes. The end result is a Lego-like building block, with strongly-typed parameters.

Now you can build complex applications and micro-services, by layering these building blocks together. That's where the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library comes in. We wanted to demonstrate the different ways in which you could use CNAB, and in particular Porter, to build deployment packages. We have CNABs that allow you to install commonly used applications like WordPress, Ghost & MatterMost. We built CNABs that deploy SQL Server Always On for AKS and an Apache AirFlow environment. We built CNABs that create a barebones Azure Kubernetes Services, and another that creates a nginx ingress controller, and another that created an OAuth2 Proxy into this barebones AKS cluster, configured with Azure Active Directory. Suddenly we've merged Cloud Native and Azure Native services, in one deployment. My personal favourite CNAB deploys K3S onto an on-prem Raspberry Pi cluster FROM AZURE. Let that sink in for a minute. We also have an example that deploys Dapr onto that Raspberry Pi Cluster.

If any of this is of interest to you, I'd highly recommend the Introduction to Azure CNAB Quickstarts video by Mike Larah, which is a 10 minute overview, containing everything you need to know. I wish something like this existed when we started the project 9 months ago!

To launch the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library, we publushed a new blog every day this week covering a different aspect. Mike introduces the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library, he also walks through Setting up Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL 2 for Windows 10 & Docker and Setting up Porter on Windows.

I've also written an An Overview of the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library and How you can contribute to the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library. I hope you find these blogs and the Quickstarts Library a useful resource! 

If you happen to be near Oxford in the UK, on Tuesday March 10th, Ian Griffiths, Technical Fellow at endjin, and Author of Programming C# 8.0 (O'Reilly) is talking at the .NET Oxford User Group on the subject of C# 8.0: Nullable Reference in Practice.

Finally, thank you to Greg Suttie for his shout out to Azure Weekly! If you find this newsletter a value resource, please share / blog / tweet about it!