Guest on AzureTalks Podcast – Containerize apps to AKS with Azure Draft, and Hybrid with Azure Arc

I am kicking off the new year as a guest on the “AzureTalks” podcast by Rolf Schutten. Rolf is a Microsoft MVP based out of the Netherlands. The AzureTalks podcast is a free-form conversation with experts and advocates around the industry discussing various topics on Azure, its services, and integration points with Azure. Some of the topics also get into strategy career, personal development, and more. You can listen to podcast episodes on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can find the website for this podcast here: www.azuretalks.com

The episode I am a guest on is #004 titled “Containerize apps to AKS with Azure Draft, and Hybrid with Azure Arc“.

In this episode, we discuss how developers can utilize Azure Draft to streamline taking their non-containerized app from code to running on AKS. Azure Draft takes you through the entire process from creating the container, the files needed to run on Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, or Kustomize, pushing up to an Azure Container Registry, and deploying to AKS.

We also dive into GitHub, GitOps, the differences between push and pull methods with continuous deployment, and even we even touched on hybrid cloud strategies and what role Azure Arc plays in this space. Listen to the audio version of the podcast episode here:

or check out the video version here.

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Guest on Kubernetes Unpacked Podcast EP014 – “Using GitOps and AKS to Build and Deploy Apps

I recently was a guest on Michael Levan‘s Kubernetes Unpacked Podcast on the Packet Pushers network.

This is Kubernetes Unpacked episode #014 it is titled: “Using GitOps And AKS To Build And Deploy Applications

Michael and I talked about using GitOps and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to automate the building and deployment of applications. We also chat about an entire architecture incorporating AKS, GitHub Actions, Azure Container Registry, GitHub, and ArgoCD along with how it all comes together to make a useful stack. Check out the podcast below.

Link to the podcast:

https://packetpushers.net/podcast/kubernetes-unpacked-014-using-gitops-and-aks-to-build-and-deploy-applications/

Listen here:

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My 1st Microsoft Article: Build and deploy apps on AKS using DevOps (GitHub Actions) and GitOps (ArgoCD)

Yesterday a new article titled “Build and deploy apps on AKS using DevOps and GitOps” was published. This is an article I was working on for a while and it is the first item of work that I can share publicly since joining Microsoft. I am working on many other things I can’t share publicly at the moment. :-)!

The article is a part of the Azure Architecture Center. This article is about modernizing end-to-end app build and deploy using containers, continuous integration (CI) via GitHub Actions for build and push to an Azure Container Registry, as well as GitOps via Argo CD for continuous deployment (CD) to an AKS cluster.

The article can be found here: 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/apps/devops-with-aks

The article explores deploying a Python and Flask based app via two CI/CD approaches push-based and pull-based (GitOps). It is complete with a pros and cons comparison of both approaches and architecture diagrams for each that you can download. Here is a screenshot of the pull-based (GitOps) architecture:

The technologies used in this article and scenario include:

GitHub

GitHub Actions

Azure Container Registry

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Argo CD (GitOps Operator)

Azure Monitor

This article also has a repository with code for both the push-based CI/CD scenario and the pull-based CI/CD (GitOps) scenario in the AKS Baseline Automation. I had the opportunity to spearhead and work on these. They will walk through using each approach and have the code for the Flask App, and GitHub Actions to run the approaches. A direct link to this section of the article is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/apps/devops-with-aks#deploy-this-scenario

I hope that you find all of this useful. Now go check out the article and deploy the app using the approaches. Stay tuned for more from me at Microsoft and for more blog posts here!

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