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Monday, 6. December 2021


Santa and the container apps in the cloud

Filed under: Diverses — Steffen Forkmann at 20:30 Uhr

The post is a part of F# Advent Calendar 2021.

As every year Santa gets a lot of wishes from children all over the world. This year one of the elves heard about a new service in cloud called Azure Container Apps. The promise of this service is to have easy deployment with docker and automatic scaling of the instances. They even advertise “scale to zero”. Since Santa usually gets most of the wishes in December and almost none during the rest of the year, this sounds like a great way to save some bucks.

So during this evaluation phase Santa and the elves are building two container apps. One that works as a HTTP API and takes wishes via HTTP POST and one that processes wishes from an Azure ServiceBus queue.

So let’s take a look at Santa’s HTTP API – it’s a very simple dockerized Saturn app with just one endpoint. The code can be found at https://github.com/forki/XMasContainerApp/tree/main/src/HTTP.

It’s just taking the body of the POST request and put’s it into an Azure ServiceBus queue.

The receiver side is in the second container app (code):

So here Santa is listening in the ServiceBus queue and calling a handler for every message. So nothing fancy here.

Now Santa wonders how to get those things into the cloud. He already knows how to use docker, so he put a DOCKERFILE next to each container app, built the container images and pushed those to his container registry.

In the next step he wants to use farmer to orchestrate the deployment of those container apps. Farmer is a lovely DSL on top of Azure Resource Manager. Santa loves farmer, but unfortunately it doesn’t support Azure Container apps yet – but a pull request for this is just yet another christmas present, right?

Santa configured both container apps with specific auto scale rules. The HTTP endpoint scales based on the number of concurrent requests. Santa decides to have at least one replica running at all times. This ensures that traffic will always be handled without long cold starts.

For the second container app scaling is based on the number of messages in the ServiceBus queue. Most of the time there won’t be any messages at all – and since processing is happening async anyway, this app can actually scale down to zero. The rest of the farmer script can be found at https://github.com/forki/XMasContainerApp/blob/main/infrastructure/Program.fs.

After a bit of testing, Santa and the elves are very happy with this approach. The workflow is decoupled and individual components can scale based on the actual traffic. He plans to invest more energy into this approach once the dust settles after christmas.

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