Week of August-1
Container-based deployment has now been around for a while, but still has not landed as a "default way of working" in a lot of IT departments, very often due to perceived complexity of the overall topic.
To get a first glance at the overall container topic, with a certain Azure flavour, let's sit back and watch DevOps Master Class - Part 7 - Containers & Friends (by John Savill) as a first start.
Azure Container Registry
Azure Container Registry (ACR) acts as the central hub when it comes to hosting container images in Azure. But ACR can do so much more, you can actually have ACR cover also the process of building a container image.
There is an excellent Learn Module on exactly this, so let's go through that ... and earn 700 XPs on the side.
Azure Container options
But having an app as a container is only half the equation. Once you have the container, you also need to run it somewhere. Azure offers a wide variety of options for hosting a container and making you application available that way.
Each of those is worth a whole week by itself, but really our goal here is to grasp containers in genera, but never the less, here are a couple of pointers to those services in Azure you would tend to look at next, anyway.
Azure Container Instance is the purest form of running a container in Azure, no bells or whistles, a managed server none the less. The start with Azure Container Instance can be a bit confusing, so let's get a basic understanding from the Learn Module "Configure Azure Container Instances" and then let's get our hands dirty with Running a Web app in a container, which is the Learn Module showing how easy it is to get a Web app deployed using Azure Container Instances.
Azure App Service is the next step up in convenience. It represents a full blown Web hosting environment which can be used to run your code directly, or - more appropriate for our topic this week - use a container to run your app.
In larger application landscapes, with more complex application architectures, based on micro services or multi-container deployments, an orchestrator will provide the necessary automation for ensuring your application components (= containers) are available when and at what scale is needed.
Kubernetes is such an orchestrator and Azure provides Kubernetes in three major "flavours".
But those are -really- for another time to dive in.