Azure Monitor Insights for Monitoring your Containers.
In the last blogpost I wrote about Microsoft Azure Arc Services and how to connect a Docker for Desktop Kubernetes Cluster for testing your DevOps solution like Container Apps, Functions, App Services in a test environment. Here you find the Link to the Installation.
One of the Microsoft Azure Arc features is Azure Monitor Insights for monitoring your Kubernetes Cluster and the Containers.
Azure Arc Insights for Kubernetes Cluster anywhere
In the following step-by-step guide we will configure Azure Monitor Insights for your Kubernetes Cluster.
I Connected my Analytics Workspace CloudMVPLab.
Click on Configure.
Onboarding your Kubernetes Cluster will take some minutes.
After a while your Kubernetes Cluster Analytics data will show in Insights.
Here you see a navigation bar with the following topics
What’s New
Cluster
Reports
Nodes
Controllers
Containers.
Insights reports of the Kubernetes Cluster
Here you can Click on default reports of your Kubernetes Cluster.
Storage Capacity and Health Status report of your Kubernetes Cluster.
Storage Capacity more in Details.
Deployments Report of your Kubernetes Cluster.
Workload details Report of your Kubernetes Cluster.
Kubelet report of your Kubernetes Cluster
Data Usage of your Kubernetes Cluster
Data Usage
Insights the Nodes of the Kubernetes Cluster
Insights of the Nodes and on the right you can view Analytics.
Here you can work with Log Analytics on your Cluster.
Insights in Controllers of your Kubernetes Cluster
Insights of your Controllers
Insights Containers of your Kubernetes Cluster
Container Insights of your Kubernetes Cluster
Container Insights with Azure Log Analytics.
So with Azure Arc Enabled Kubernetes Clusters you can monitoring your Cluster and running Containers to keep you in Control on what is happening on the Cluster but also with your Container Apps and microservices. After this you can set Alerts and notifications when something is going wrong or offline. With this running you can start running your own App services, Containers or Azure functions on your Kubernetes Cluster.
This configuration with Docker for Desktop Kubernetes Cluster is for testing purpose only and can be used for your own DevOps solutions before you deploy on Production Ready Clusters. With Azure Arc Enabled Kubernetes Clusters you get the powerful Microsoft Azure Features and solutions in a secure way on your Kubernetes Cluster. I wish you lot of success with Azure Arc Enabled Kubernetes Clusters to make Awesome Apps and IT solutions for the Business 😉
I Hope everyone had a Great Microsoft Build 2021 Online Conference this week. Microsoft announced a lot of new features and Hybrid Cloud Solutions at Build 2021 🙂 If you missed this Awesome Build 2021 event, you can watch the highlights on demand here.
DevOps and developers are increasingly using microservices-based architectures with containerized applications for agility and flexibility. Azure Arc extends the single control plane from Azure to enable you to build apps consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. With this information I was thinking, can I connect Microsoft Azure Arc Services to my Surface Book 3 with Windows 10 Preview Insiders Build 21390 and Docker for Windows with Kubernetes Cluster 1.19.7 active?
IMPORTANT: The following step-by-step guide is for testing purpose only.
Installing Docker for Windows with Kubernetes Cluster on Windows 10
First you need to have Docker for Windows 10.
System requirements
Your Windows machine must meet the following requirements to successfully install Docker Desktop.
WSL 2 backend
Hyper-V backend and Windows containers
WSL 2 backend
Windows 10 64-bit: Home, Pro, Enterprise, or Education, version 1903 (Build 18362 or higher).
Enable the WSL 2 feature on Windows. For detailed instructions, refer to the Microsoft documentation.
The following hardware prerequisites are required to successfully run WSL 2 on Windows 10:
With docker desktop for Windows you can switch between Windows Containers and Linux Containers. When you want to have a Kubernetes Cluster on your Windows 10 device active you have to switch to Linux Containers in the taskbar like this :
It’s now active for Linux Containers. (Default)
Right Click on the Docker tray icon and go to Settings.
Then go to Kubernetes to enable your Cluster locally on your Windows 10 Device.
When you apply it take some minutes for the installation.
When you see the Kubernetes icon on green, then your Cluster is running.
When you do a lot of DevOps work you use Microsoft Visual Studio Code for Free, because here you can see your Kubernetes Cluster and try your own code or Apps.
Kubernetes Cluster is running locally on your Windows 10 device.
Installing Microsoft Azure Arc Agent
The next step is to install the Microsoft Azure Arc agent on your Windows 10 device.
Login in your Azure Subscription, if you don’t have one you can start here
Search for Azure Arc in your subscription.
Click on Servers and Click on Add.
Click on add a Single Server.
Click on Generate Script.
Prerequisites for the Azure Arc Agent.
Select your Azure Subscription and Resource Group
Choose your Region.
Operating System is Windows. ( your Windows10 device)
Click on Next.
More Features like Security, Monitoring, Automation :
Features for Kubernetes in Azure Arc Services.
Here you see in Visual Studio Code your Azure-Arc Helm Release.
Conclusion
“Learn how to write once and run anywhere using your preferred cloud-native application services. Ensure governance, compliance and security for your deployments, all through a single pane of glass management experience in Azure.”
With Microsoft Azure Arc Services you bring Azure Cloud Technology anywhere for your Apps, Containers, microservices.
I Hope this is a first start for exploring and testing your Hybrid Cloud solution. Wish you a lot of fun and happy coding 😉
Dapris an open source, portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge. Dapr enables developers to focus on writing business logic and not solving distributed system challenges, thereby significantly improving their productivity, and reducing development time. Dapr lowers the bar for entry to build modern cloud native applications based on a microservices architecture and with this v1.0 release, Dapr applications can be deployed to self-hosted infrastructure or Kubernetes clusters in production scenarios.
Foreword byMark RussinovichAzure CTO and Technical FellowMicrosoft
With the wave of cloud adoption well underway, there is a major shift happening towards “cloud native” development, often built with microservice-architectures. These microservices are both stateless and stateful, and run on the cloud and edge, embracing the diversity of languages and frameworks available today. This enterprise shift is driven by both the market forces of faster time to market, as well as the scale and efficiencies of building services for the cloud. Even before COVID-19, cloud adoption was accelerating for enterprises and developers were being asked to do even more to deliver on building these distributed system applications, and that has only accelerated since. Developers in enterprises seek to focus on business logic, while leaning on platforms to imbue their applications with scale, resiliency, maintainability, elasticity, and the other attributes of cloud-native architectures, which is why there is also shift towards serverless platforms that hide the underlying infrastructure. Developers should not be expected to become distributed systems experts. This is where Dapr steps in to help you, whether you are building on infrastructure such as Kubernetes, or on a serverless platform.
Dapr is designed as an enterprise, developer-focused, microservices programming model platform with the mantra “any language, any framework, run anywhere”. It makes building distributed applications easy and portable across any infrastructure, from public-cloud, through hierarchical edge, and even down to single node IoT devices. It emerged from both our experiences building services in Azure as well as time spent working with customers building applications on Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Service Fabric. Over and over, we saw common problems that they had to address. It became clear that there was a need to provide a “library” of common microservice best practices that developers could use, not only in new greenfield applications, but also to aid in the modernization of existing applications. In the containerized, distributed, and networked cloud native world, the sidecar model has emerged as the preferred approach, in the same way DLLs are preferred in the client/server generation. Using Dapr’s sidecar and APIs give you, as a developer, all the power of distributed systems functionality, with the ease of a single HTTP or gRPC local call.
To address the wide range of scenarios that developers face, Dapr provides features such as state management, service to service invocation, pub/sub and integration to external systems with I/O bindings, which are based on the triggers and bindings of Azure Functions. These in turn take advantage of Dapr’s component model which allows you to “swap out”, say different underlying state stores, without having to change any code, making code more portable, more flexible and allowing for experimentation of what best suits your needs. Developers don’t need to learn and incorporate service SDKs into their code, worry about authentication, secret management, retries or conditional code that targets specific deployment environments.
This book shows how Dapr reduces your development time and overall code maintenance by incrementally “Daperizing” the canonical .NET reference application, eShop. For example, in the original eShop implementation, significant amounts of code were written to abstract between Azure Service Bus and RabbitMQ for publishing events between services. All this code can be discarded and simply replaced with Dapr’s pub/sub API and component model which had an even wider range of pub/sub brokers, rather than just two. Dapr’s actor model, when used in the reworked eShop application, shows the ease of building long running, stateful, event driven, workflow applications with all the difficulties of concurrency and multi-threading removed. By the end of this book, you will see the drastic simplification that Dapr brings to your application development, and I firmly believe all developers embarking on a cloud native app building journey should leverage Dapr.
We publicly announced Dapr with the v0.1 release in Oct 2019 and now, a year and half later, I am thrilled to say that Dapr is ready for production usage with the v1.0 release. Getting Dapr to v1.0 has truly been a community effort. It has been amazing to see the open-source community coalesce around Dapr and grow since it was first announced – from 114 contributors in October 2019 to over 700 in early 2021 – a six-fold increase in 16 months! Contributions to the project have gone to every Dapr repo and have ranged from opening issues, commenting on feature proposals, providing samples, and of course contributing code. The parts of the project community members have contributed to the most include the Dapr runtime, docs, CLI, SDKs and the creation of a rich ecosystem of components. Maintaining this openness is critical to Dapr’s future.
Dapr is really just getting started, though, and you should expect to see more Dapr capabilities and more support for Dapr in Azure services. I hope that you will take advantage of Dapr to enable you to focus on your core business logic and accelerate your microservices development. I am are excited to have you join us in the Dapr community on this journey athttps://github.com/dapr/and on Discord https://aka.ms/dapr-discord.
Modern distributed systems are complex. You start with small, loosely coupled, independently deployable services. These services cross process and server boundaries. They then consume different kinds of infrastructure backing services (databases, message brokers, key vaults). Finally, these disparate pieces compose together to form an application.
Mark RussinovichAzure CTO and Technical FellowMicrosoft
Thank you Author; Rob Vettor, Sander Molenkamp and Edwin van Wijk for this Awesome E-book 😉
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) gives you the most command-line tools, utilities, and applications directly on Windows. I’m using Microsoft Windows Admin Center and Windows Server Core 20H2 with Build version 19042.746 to deploy WSL 2 with Ubuntu 18.04 Linux Distro. Here you find the installation of the Windows Server Core 20H2 with Windows Admin Center
In the following steps we will install the Following :
Ubuntu 18.04 is Running in WSL2 on Windows Server Core 20H2 😉
Conclusion
First of All Microsoft Windows Admin Center is supporting me in the Installation of Windows Subsystem for Linux. We have WSL 2 Running with Ubuntu 18.04 with a lot of possibilities!
What I really like is integration, like in Windows 10 and Docker for desktop with the WSL 2 Engine. Here my Blogpost
Together with VSCode Remote WSL is Cool.
Would be awesome to run Docker Windows and Linux Containers in combination with WSL 2 integration on Windows Server Core edition. Maybe in the Future, who knows?
Upload, download, and manage Azure blobs, files, queues, and tables, as well as Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Data Lake Storage entities. Easily access virtual machine disks, and work with either Azure Resource Manager or classic storage accounts. Manage and configure cross-origin resource sharing rules.
Here you see how easy it is to create a snapshot before you begin with a Installation on the Azure Virtual Machine.
Create a Snapshot
Give the Snapshot a Name and select the Resource Group.
Snapshot Created Successfully 😉
When you open the Azure Portal and search for snapshots :
Phantom OS Disk with a Full Snapshot.
Azure Storage Explorer Emulator for Developers
Azurite open source Azure Storage API compatible server (emulator)
Azurite is an open source Azure Storage API compatible server (emulator). Based on Node.js, Azurite provides cross platform experiences for customers wanting to try Azure Storage easily in a local environment. Azurite simulates most of the commands supported by Azure Storage with minimal dependencies.
Azurite V2 is manually created with pure JavaScript, popular and active as an open source project. However, Azure Storage APIs are growing and keeping updating, manually keeping Azurite up to date is not efficient and prone to bugs. JavaScript also lacks strong type validation which prevents easy collaboration.
Compared to V2, Azurite V3 implements a new architecture leveraging code generated by a TypeScript Server Code Generator we created. The generator uses the same swagger (modified) used by the new Azure Storage SDKs. This reduces manual effort and facilitates better code alignment with storage APIs.
3.0.0-preview is the first release version using Azurite’s new architecture.
Features & Key Changes in Azurite V3
Blob storage features align with Azure Storage API version 2020-04-08 (Refer to support matrix section below)
Queue storage features align with Azure Storage API version 2020-04-08 (Refer to support matrix section below)
SharedKey/Account SAS/Service SAS
Get/Set Queue Service Properties
Preflight Request
Create/List/Delete Queues
Put/Get/Peek/Updata/Deleta/Clear Messages
Features NEW on V3
Built with TypeScript and ECMA native promise and async features
New architecture based on TypeScript server generator. Leverage auto generated protocol layer, models, serializer, deserializer and handler interfaces from REST API swagger
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer tool can make your life easier to do your Azure Storage Management. Copy – Paste data is a Great and handy feature for Administrators.
Hope this is useful and go try it yourself.
Working with Dapr in WSL2 Remote VSCode and Ubuntu 20.04 distro
Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.
Developer language SDKs and frameworks
To make using Dapr more natural for different languages, it also includes language specific SDKs for Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET and Python. These SDKs expose the functionality in the Dapr building blocks, such as saving state, publishing an event or creating an actor, through a typed, language API rather than calling the http/gRPC API. This enables you to write a combination of stateless and stateful functions and actors all in the language of their choice. And because these SDKs share the Dapr runtime, you get cross-language actor and functions support.
I’m using Windows Insider Build version 21277-RS with Docker for Windows Edge and Visual Studio Code.
Docker for Windows Edge Version Running.
Because Docker for Windows Edge support WSL2 Engine and Visual Studio Code too, brought me to an idea to build dapr into Ubuntu 20.04 WSL Distro on my Windows Insiders 21277 RS version on my Surface Book 3. There for you must activate the WSL2 integration with my default WSL distro Ubuntu-20.04.
Dapr init ( in the Ubuntu-20.04 WSL2 Linux distro )
Here you find the Dapr dev environment installation types for Dapr init, I did the standalone version. Dapr makes then the following containers :
Dapr Containers.
Then we have the following running :
Dapr Dashboard
Zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data.
Zipkin Traces
Dapr Dashboard
Now we have Dapr running in the WSL2 Ubuntu-20.04 distro, you can use Visual Studio Code on Windows Insiders using Remote WSL and work with your favourite dapr SDK like the list above 😉
From here you can work with your dapr application.
In this guide dapr is running with Docker containers, but you can also install it on Kubernetes or K8s, AKS, Azure any where, see this overview :
Dapr with Kubenetes Containers.
Dapr Overview.
Important Note : Dapr is now production ready with version 1.0 ! Developers, DevOps, AzOps, you can start with it and Build and Test your own microservices and Container apps ! Hope you are having fun with it too 😉
Windows Admin Center is a locally deployed, browser-based app for managing Windows servers, clusters, hyper-converged infrastructure, as well as Windows 10 PCs. It comes at no additional cost beyond Windows and is ready to use in production. If you want to work more secure with Windows Server Core images without the GUI or with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI operating system then Windows Admin Center is the tool for the Administrator to manage your workloads on-premises or in the Cloud. You have one web based interface for all your Server consoles (MMC) to manage your Hybrid Datacenter.
Here you can read more about Microsoft Windows Admin Center and download the free software.
Get the best with Windows Admin Center Extensions
Windows Admin Center and the Container Extension
When you have installed Microsoft Windows Admin Center you can configure the settings and extensions for your environment. When you want the benefits of the Microsoft azure Cloud Services you can configure your Azure subscription and add the extensions to your Windows Admin Center. There are also Third Party extensions like Dell, DataOn, Fujitsu and more. Here you find more information about how extensions work.
Container Extension
In the following step-by-step guide we will work with the Container Extension of Windows Admin Center on a Windows Server 2019. You have already added the server in WAC and installed the Container extension. In my MVPLAB.CLOUD is that Windows Server 2019 datacenter Starship01.mvplab.cloud. When you open the server you will come in the Overview of the Windows Server:
Click on Containers.
Click on Install for the Docker installation on Starship01.mvplab.cloud.
This will install Docker on the Windows Server 2019 and reboot when it’s ready to use for Containers. From this moment you can work with Windows Containers on the host via Windows Admin Center.
Remote Desktop in Windows Admin Center, the docker host is installed with the Windows Filter by default.
When you want to use Docker Linux Containers with Windows Server 2019 host, you have to configure the Linux kit LCOW with a distro on the host. More info here
Containers on Starship01.mvplab.cloud
To start with containers you can create your own, or pull an image from Docker Hub with Windows Admin Center. In my case I pull Windows Server 2019 ltsc with IIS image.
mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore/iis (Image)
windowsservercore-ltsc2019 (Tag)
Click then on Pull.
Select your image and click on Run.
Give your Container a name and set your settings.
Click on Run.
Click on Containers tab and you will see your running Container
More details you see the IP-Address of the Container.
IIS is running on Windows Server 2019 ltsc in a Docker Windows Container.
That was easy right 😉
Making your Own Docker file with Windows Admin Center Container Extension
When you have your own Github repository with your software, you can make your own docker file and make a docker image on your host for deployment. To show this I have used this sample on Microsoft docs, but you can clone also a github repository and copy the dockerfile on the host.
I copied the dockerfile on the host C:\BuildImage.
—————
# Sample Dockerfile
# Indicates that the windowsservercore image will be used as the base image. FROM mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019
# Metadata indicating an image maintainer. LABEL maintainer=”jshelton@contoso.com”
# Uses dism.exe to install the IIS role. RUN dism.exe /online /enable-feature /all /featurename:iis-webserver /NoRestart
# Creates an HTML file and adds content to this file. RUN echo “Hello World – Dockerfile” > c:\inetpub\wwwroot\index.html
# Sets a command or process that will run each time a container is run from the new image. CMD [ “cmd” ]
In Windows Admin Center comes ITpro world and DevOps world Together in One web based console like with the Container extension. Microsoft is developing really fast in Windows Admin Center to get all the right Feature for ITPro, DevOps and SecOps Administrators in one place. Awesome are the Windows Admin Center Extensions, developers makes these better and better to do the job for Administrators 🚀
Windows Server 2019 Core and Azure Stack HCI are Operating systems without a GUI, and with Windows Admin Center they are really good to manage, update and keeping in control of security.
I like Windows Admin Center a lot and it Rocks for managing your hybrid Datacenter 😉
Send your comments and feedback via Microsoft GitHub repoby opening a new issue for the Container Extension. Follow @vrapolinario on Twitter
You can Follow Windows Admin Center here on Twitter : @servermgmt
People, Process, and Technology to continually provide value to customers.
While adopting DevOps practices automates and optimizes processes through technology, it all starts with the culture inside the organization—and the people who play a part in it. The challenge of cultivating a DevOps culture requires deep changes in the way people work and collaborate. But when organizations commit to a DevOps culture, they can create the environment for high-performing teams to develop.
My name is James van den Berg and I’m a MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management on my DevOps journey as an IT Infrastructure Guy managing datacenters on-prem and in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Today It’s not only a Virtual Machine or a Website to deploy for your customers, it’s much more then that like :
Time to market, deploy your solution fast without waiting on dependencies because you automated your process with a CI CD Pipeline.
Security and Monitoring to keep you in Controle.
Working together with different Teams who are each responsible for a part of the solution.
With 30+ Community talks, learning sessions, and skill-building activities exploring Minecraft, MakeCode, Visual Studio, AI, Azure, and more, there is something here for every student and every level of experience!
Earlier I wrote a blogpost about Microsoft Azure Service Fabric Standalone Cluster for Dev testing. This was 5 – Node Azure Service Fabric Cluster locally installed, but now I like to have a bigger ASF Cluster on my
Windows Server 2019 for testing with Visual Studio.
