What if you could just add a package to your code? Like npm for node or nuget for .NET, run your app and have it in a container on a Kubernetes cluster? No command line tools like kubectl, helm, docker or whatever we are currently using to create our containerized apps today. Not these are bad, but it should be easier or native to how we are currently writing our apps. Metaparticle.io Metaparticle (metaparticale.io) is a new tool, in progress, announced at KubeCon from Brendan Burns and it's goal is to do just that, make it easier for devs to containerized their applications by just writing code. JavaScript example See full tutorial: https://metaparticle.io/tutorials/javascript/ package....

The Azure Functions team has been doing some great work lately and as a part of that work the runtime for the runtime of the serverless function was ported to .NET Core 2.0 in late September. This set the stage really for cross-platform development and running of Azure Functions and in November; Azure Functions on Linux was announced for Preview. What does it all mean? There is a serverless framework for Azure that we can run in a container on Linux (and maybe a Raspberry PI??) and deploy to Kubernetes on the managed host in Azure...AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service). Requirements Docker .NET Core 2.0 The latest azure-functions-core-tools npm install -g azure-functions-core-tools@core The sample code for the...

I recently picked up a Surface Book to start showing that I could do my job regardless of the machine I had. My talks around using command line for ASP.NET Core and Azure have primarily been using my MacBook Pro so to add some diversity to my presentations a core Windows machine is now in the bag too. The Windows Subsystem for Linux is really something and I wanted to get it setup close to or if not the same as I have my OSX dev environment setup. I use oh-my-zsh inside iTerm2 and a slew of .dotfiles for scripts and aliases for the command line stuff I like to do. Sure enough, talk about great timing, I saw...

Modernizing legacy apps has become the theme towards the end of this year or also known as "Lift and Shift". This means taking the monolithic applications built with blood, sweat, and tears and now move them to the cloud. Nerd Dinner (https://nerddinner.codeplex.com/) is an MVC application written back in 2010, the last edit was ~Sept 6, 2013 to the mvc4 branch. I grabbed the mvc branch and copied it over to https://github.com/spboyer/nerddinner-mvc4 and fired it up in Visual Studio 2017. The plan: Migrate the LocalDB to SQL Server in Azure Using the Docker tools in Visual Studio 2017, add the Docker files Publish Docker Images to Azure Container Registry (ACR) Push the new...

Figuring out the best way to build and deploy any application regardless of the tech stack can be a sprint all in itself. So many questions to answer: What CI/CD pipeline do you use? Can't we just use the CLI? What about right-click-publish? Git Deploy? npm, yarn ? Docker, Kubernetes, Swarm, Containers...oh my!?!?! Yes or "it depends" is always the answer to these questions depending on the development shop you're working in. Docker, in version 1.17, introduced the concept of multi-stage builds which in short allows you to (in a single docker file) create images and utilize the output from one into the next to produce a final image and reduce the need for build scripts etc. See...