Azure Weekly

Issue #348 - 7th November 2021

Welcome to issue 348 of Azure Weekly - an Ignite 2021 special! As ever, a great summary of all things Ignite are covered in the Microsoft Book of News. There are a vast number of announcements. I'm going to take a slightly different approach. There are some great high level vision / positioning posts by senior Microsoft folks, and there are two new services that are worth highlighting. For all the other announcements, they are in organised by the usual categories.

The high level vision posts are: Key foundations for protecting your data with Azure confidential computing by Mark Russinovich, Innovate with cloud-native apps and open source on Azure by Brendan Burns, Powering all your applications from cloud to edge with Azure infrastructure by Erin Chapple, Your hybrid, multicloud, and edge strategy just got better with Azure by Kathleen Mitford, New investments to help you accelerate your Azure migration and modernization journey by Tanuj Bansal and Putting Tools in Your Hands to Improve Developer Productivity by Daniel Carrasco and Alison Yu.

Now onto the two new services! The first is Azure Chaos Studio, a fully managed service which systematically improves resilience with controlled chaos. This another great example of tools the Azure Product Groups use to make the core platform better, being made available to end customers to improve their solution's resilience. I'm really looking forward to testing out some of our apps & services with this tool.

Personally, the only announcement that mattered this week was the unveiling of Azure Container Apps. I've been fortunate to be on the private preview for this service and have been very impressed. Any long time readers will know I'm a huge advocate of serverless (and have delivered a number of large scale solutions using Azure Functions). Functions excels at event processing where cold starts don't really have an impact, but with HTTP based workloads, where the consumer is often a human being, cold starts are really noticeable, especially the compound effect of Functions calling Functions.

One of the Proof of Concepts I ran was to take one of our OpenAPI services which is currently hosted in Functions, and ported that over to Container Apps. Luckily we already added a hosting environment abstraction, so it was really just a case of re-hosting our OpenAPI framework in an Kestrel self-hosted ASP .NET Core app. The whole process took less than 45 minutes. The cold start performance was noticeable lower (700ms) and once "warmed" the responses were in the 115ms range. Many people have asked me via Twitter about why they'd use ACA over other available options, luckily the product group knew this would be a FAQ and have put together some documentation comparing Container Apps with other Azure container options.

My perspective is threefold; 1) many orgs want access to the power of Kubernetes, but aren't capable of the required step change in complexity and management overhead. ACA solves this problem nicely. 2) Many orgs have struggled to find a cost-effective migration path from their legacy on-premise "Windows Services" based architectures into Azure. ACA solves this too. 3) The real value in ACA is that it offers "Dapr as a Service". We've had a managed Service Fabric offerings for a number of years, but if you wanted a production Dapr workload you had to take the burden outlined in 1). Dapr is a fantastic framework (which also joined CNCF as an incubating project this week), and ACA is the perfect environment to host it.

If you want to dig in a little deeper there have been a number of great posts about ACA from the community; Thorsten Hans has been busy test driving the service and has a number of interesting posts: Introduction to Azure Container Apps, How to deploy Azure Container Apps with Bicep, and Traffic split in Azure Container Apps. Geert Baeke also offers his view Taking Azure Container Apps for a spin, as does Sam Cogan: WTH are Azure Container Apps.

As one event finishes, another starts.... remember that the Visual Studio 2022 Launch Event is on the 8th. I'm personally very excited for the Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6.0 launch - as .NET 6.0 should drastically simplify many of our .NET based projects. Finally, we've published a long in gestation blog post: Flex Your DevSecOps Muscles With Bicep, which includes a FREE Bicep Cheat Sheet. Have a read, download the cheat sheet and please provide us with any feedback so we can improve it!