Challenge 8 - Path B: Dapr-enabled Services running in Azure Container Apps (ACA)

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Introduction

In this challenge, you’re going to deploy the Dapr-enabled services you have written locally to an Azure Container Apps service.

• Update all the host names & port numbers to use the Dapr defaults since it will be running in ACA.
• Build Docker images of all 3 services & upload to the Azure Container Registry.
• Deploy your service images to your ACA service.
• Run your Simulation service locally.

Success Criteria

To complete this challenge, you must reach the following goals:

• Validate that all 3 services are compiled into Docker images & stored in an Azure Container Registry.
• Validate that you have successfully deployed all 3 services (VehicleRegistrationService, TrafficControlService & FineCollectionService) to an ACA service.
• Validate that the local Simulation service runs & connects to your ACA-hosted services and that all the previous functionality still works (input messages, output messages, speeding violation emails, etc).

Tips

• Change the host name for each service (in the Program.cs file) from http://localhost to http://* as this will allow the Kestrel server to bind to 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1. This is needed to ensure the health probes work in Kubernetes.
  • Debugging K8S Connection Refused
• Dapr on ACA (at this time) doesn’t support declarative pub/sub subscriptions, so you will need to modify the FineCollectionService. to subscribe to the collectfine topic programmatically using the Dapr SDK.
  • You will have to modify both the FineCollectionService/Startup.cs & the FineCollectionService/Controllers/CollectionController.cs files.
    • ASP.NET Core Controller example
  • Dapr .NET SDK - Programmatic subscriptions
• Use ACR Tasks to simplify creation & deployment of the images to the registry.

Learning Resources

• Dapr integration with Azure Container Apps

Thanks for participating in these hands-on challenges! Hopefully you’ve learned about Dapr and how to use it. Obviously, these challenges barely scratch the surface of what is possible with Dapr. We have not touched upon subjects like: hardening production environments, actors, integration with Azure Functions and Azure API Management just to name a few. So if you’re interested in learning more, I suggest you read the Dapr documentation.