Containers

Over the past two years, I have worked extensively with Azure Container Apps (ACA) and have gained valuable insights into its capabilities and limitations. In this post, I share ten key lessons learned from real-world experience. 1. You get much of Kubernetes without the added complexity Azure Container Apps provides a streamlined way to run containerized applications without the overhead of managing Kubernetes infrastructure. It abstracts away much of the operational complexity, allowing developers to focus on building and deploying applications. Despite this abstraction, ACA retains powerful Kubernetes features such as ingress, scaling, auto-healing, service discovery, and networking. ...

I’ve been a fan of Svelte for a while. It’s fast, elegant, and works nicely with SvelteKit. But like any tool, it comes with maintenance overhead. For larger applications, that overhead is worth it. But for smaller projects—like Sharp Cert Manager, which only has a single page and a popup—the cost felt too high. In fact, I found myself spending more time upgrading Svelte or Vite than it would take to simply rewrite the page. So, I decided it was time for something simpler. The frontend for Sharp Cert Manager is intentionally minimal and I don’t expect that to change. All I really need is a page that lists monitored certificates and a popup with their details. ...

If you’re deploying a Windows x86 (32-bit) .NET app, you’re probably used to hosting it on a VM with IIS. While deploying the same app as a container is possible, it’s not straightforward. This post will walk you through deploying a 32-bit .NET 8 app as a container in Azure using Azure App Service. TLDR; Find the code here: github. Creating the Dockerfile The first step is to create a Docker image for the app. You’ll need to use Windows Server Core as the base image because the Nano edition doesn’t support x86 applications. Note that there are no .NET base images with the x86 runtime, so you’ll have to manually install the .NET and ASP.NET runtimes. ...

Let’s face it, managing TLS certs is a pain (no pun intended). If you have only a few, it is manageable. A simple recurring calendar reminder to make sure you reissue or download and install the new cert will work. However, what happens when you have dozens? Also, what if the responsibility is shared accross different teams? As the saying goes “too many cooks spoil the broth”. While there are great cloud native solutions, like Azure Key Vault, many enterprise environments are not capable of using them. That is why I started a new open-source side-project and I think it can be useful to more people. ...