Azure Hands-On - Deploying a Web Application with AKS and ACR

📝Introduction

In this hands-on lab, we walked through deploying a web application using Azure AKS and ACR.

📝Log in to the Azure Management Console

Using your credentials, make sure you're using the right Region. In my case, I am using the region France Central in my Cloud Playground Sandbox.

📌Note: You can also use the VSCode tool or from your local Terminal to connect to Azure CLI

More information on how to set it up is at the link.

📝Prerequisites:

Update to PowerShell 5.1, if needed.
Install .NET Framework 4.7.2 or later.
Visual Code
Web Browser (Chrome, Edge)
Azure CLI installed
Azure subscription
Docker installed

📝Setting an Azure Storage Account to Load Bash or PowerShell

Click the Cloud Shell icon (>_) at the top of the page.

Click PowerShell.

Click Show Advanced Settings. Use the combo box under Cloud Shell region to select the Region. Under Resource Group and Storage account(It's a globally unique name), enter a name for both. In the box under File Share, enter a name. Click ***Create storage (***if you don't have any yet).

📝Set up your Azure AKS environment

Login to Azure:
```
 az login
```

Set the subscription (if you have multiple):

 az account set subscription <your-subscription-id>

📝Create a Resource Group

az group create --resource-group <nameResourceGroup> --location <region>

📝 Create an Azure Container Registry (ACR)

az acr create --resource-group <nameResourceGroup> --name <nameContainerRegistry> --sku Basic

📝 Build and Push Docker Image to ACR

Login to ACR:

 az acr login --name <nameContainerRegistry>

Create a Dockerfile

Create an Dockerfile in-your-project directory. Here’s an example Dockerfile for a simple Nginx HTML webpage:
```
 FROM nginx:alpine
 COPY index.html /usr/share/nginx/html
```
Build Docker image:
```
 docker build -t <nameapp>:v1 .
```

Tag the Docker image:

 docker tag <nameapp>:v1 <nameContainerRegistry>.azurecr.io/<nameapp>:v1

Push the Docker image to ACR:

 docker push <nameContainerRegistry>.azurecr.io/<nameapp>:v1

📝Create an AKS Cluster

az aks create -g <nameResourceGroup> -n <nameAKSCluster> --node-count 1 --generate-ssh-keys --attach-acr demoacrx1

📝 Connect to AKS Cluster

Use the Azure Cloud Shell to check your AKS Cluster resources, by following the steps below:

Go to Azure Dashboard, and click on the Resource Group created for this Lab, looking for your AKS Cluster resource.
On the Overview tab, click on Connect to your AKS Cluster.
A new window will be opened, so you only need to open the Azure CLI and run the following commands:

az login
az account set subscription <your-subscription-id>
az aks get-credentials -g <nameRersourceGroup> -n <nameAKSCluster> --overwrite-existing

After that, you can run some Kubectl commands to check the default AKS Cluster resources.

📝Deploy the Application to AKS

Create a Kubernetes deployment yaml file (deployment.yaml):

 apiVersion: apps/v1
 kind: Deployment
 metadata:
   name: demoapp
 spec:
   replicas: 2
   selector:
     matchLabels:
       app: demoapp
   template:
     metadata:
       labels:
         app: demoapp
     spec:
       containers:
       - name: demoapp
         image: demoacrx1.azurecr.io/demoapp:v1
         ports:
         - containerPort: 8080
 ---
 apiVersion: v1
 kind: Service
 metadata:
   name: demoapp
 spec:
   type: LoadBalancer
   ports:
     - port: 80
       targetPort: 8080
   selector:
     app: demoapp

Apply the deployment:

 kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml
 kubectl exec -it <namepod> -- curl localhost

Checking the resources created and running into the AKS Cluster:

 kubectl get pods
 kubectl get svc
 kubectl get deployment
 kubectl describe pod <namepod>

To check if the containers are loading correctly the Nginx HTML webpage, run the following command:
```
 kubectl exec -it <namepod> -- curl localhost
```