Provision an Azure Container Instance

Lab Overview:

This hands-on lab provides an Azure administrator with an understanding of how to migrate an on-premise system to a serverless container-based environment in Microsoft Azure. You will learn how to provision, test, and monitor an Azure Container Instance. Azure’s Container Instances give you the ability to package, deploy, and manage your applications in the cloud, with the guaranteed isolation, as if it were operating within its own VM. You will also get hands-on experience using Azure’s Cloud Shell to easily set up your environment within the Azure Portal. These skills are essential for a System Administrator or Developer operating in a Microsoft Azure environment.

Understand the scenario

You are a system administrator for a company that is migrating its document processing system from its datacenter to Azure. Since Microsoft Azure offers the ability to deploy container-based applications within an Azure Cloud Instance, you will be able to save your organization’s resources (time and money) by reducing the overhead to manage your legacy on-prem applications. You need to provision a container instance to host services for processing documents. You will first provision an Azure Container Instance. You will then apply a load test to the instance and monitor the resources to see that they are working.

Provision an Azure Container Instance:

The Azure container Instance service enables you to package, deploy, and manage applications in containers on the Microsoft Azure cloud without having to provision or manage any underlying infrastructure. You can lift and shift your on-premise applications as part of a cloud migration strategy, enabling your organization to reap the benefits of cloud-based services. In this section, you will provision a Linux-based Container Instance, providing it with the CPU cores, memory, and port configurations required for it to function. These provisioned resources will be the target destination of your application.

Test the Azure Container Instance:

For this task, you will learn how to use Cloud Shell with a pre-configured python script to simulate a load in the container-hosted service. You will become familiar with the Bash commands to pull down a web-hosted file for local use (using curl), modify the permissions on the file (using chmod), and run the python script to test the container-hosted service (the script will run a TCP ping against your service’s listening port).

Monitor the Azure Container Instance:

In this section, you will use the same script with a different option (load test) to simulate a load on your container. Then you will learn how to review logs and Azure’s container monitoring capability for monitoring resource performance. You will see the impact of the load test on the CPU and confirm that the logging works.

Lab Summary Conclusion:

In this hands-on virtual lab, you will learn how to perform the Microsoft Azure administrative tasks required to migrate an on-prem service Azure’s serverless container-based environment. You will get hands-on experience with using Azure’s Cloud Shell command-line interface to perform tasks, such provision and test a container instance. You will then review the logs and metrics of your container instance to ensure it is operating correctly. These skills are essential for Azure Administrators and Developers.

Other Challenges in this series

• GUIDED CHALLENGE: Provision a Container-based Web App
• ADVANCED CHALLENGE: Can you Provision a Managed Environment for Container Execution?