Challenge 8 - Dapr-enabled Services running in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

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Introduction

In this challenge, you’re going to deploy the Dapr-enabled services you have written locally to an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.

• Update all the host names & port numbers to use the Dapr defaults since it will be running in AKS.
• Create a Kubernetes secret in your AKS cluster that references your Azure KeyVault secrets.
• Update the Dapr secret configuration file to pull secrets from the Kubernetes secret.
• Build Docker images of all 3 services & upload to the Azure Container Registry.
• Deploy your service images to your AKS cluster.
• 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 AKS cluster.
• Validate that the local Simulation service runs & connects to your AKS-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
• Use ACR Tasks to simplify creation & deployment of the images to the registry.
• Modify the Resources/Infrastructure/Helm/dapr-trafficcontrol/values.yaml with the specific connection strings, tenant IDs, registry names, etc for your deployment.
• Use Helm to deploy all the AKS configuration files to Azure. Helm will substitute the values in the values.yaml file into the various configuration files.

• Use various kubectl commands to validate that all the services are running in your AKS cluster. Here are some useful ones.

  • Get all pods (in the current namespace)

    kubectl get pods
    

  • Describe a specific pod (to help debug deployment issues)

    kubectl describe pod <pod-name>
    

  • Tail the logs of a specific pod (and follow)

    kubectl logs fine-collection-service-7c99df4c85-2bxvf -f
    

Learning Resources

• AKS Key Vault integration
• AKS Workload Identity

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.