How to deploy a dockerized app to Microsoft Azure Web App for Containers

Deploying a Docker container on Azure ‘Web App for Containers’ can be done fairly easy. In this blog post, I will provide a step by step guide to get you started. Some basic knowledge of Azure and Docker definitely helps. But why should you care in the first place? You will get:

  • a managed runtime (for a single image)
  • scaling to multiple instances
  • HTTPS
  • a simple deployment model
  • easy integration with App Insights (Azure’s Monitoring system for Web Apps)
  • use any Azure SaaS like CosmosDB, MSSQL, …

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Descriptor property substitution in EAP6 and JBoss AS7

Motivation

In a software development process, there are usually multiple environments, such as development, test and production, etc. The development team usually provides the QA users a test version before acceptance and production, as illustrated below.
deployment chain in development
If, however, the application contains assumptions about the environment, this chain is broken. Therefore it is good practice, for the deployment to make no assumptions about the target environment. A good way to achieve this is that the application servers provide the environment specific configurations of the application, such as datasource configuration or integration of other Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). But this is often not so easy.

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Provisioning Maven artifacts with Puppet

Our last blog post introduced how Puppet can be used to achieve Infrastructure-As-Code, and how to deploy Play applications following this practice. However, we didn’t address how the applications are actually copied to the host.

Apache Maven is a widely used build tool adopted by more and more companies to support their build process from compilation to deployment. Deploying, in the  Maven world,  means uploading the artifact to a Maven repository. Such Maven repositories are managed using Sonatype Nexus or JFrog Artifactory. However, this sort of deployment does not address the real provisioning of the application, i.e the deployment on the production servers.

This blog post presents a Puppet module to download Maven artifacts from a Nexus repository. This module closes the gap between the development team deploying their artifacts to a Maven repository, and the administration team responsible for installing and configuring the application.

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Deploying Play Framework applications with Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management tool made to ease the management of your infrastructure by making it more traceable and easier to understand. It allows infrastructure-as-code, a major trend today to deal with the complexity of infrastructure management.

On the other side, Play framework is a promoting a new way to build web applications, making this sort of development more efficient and productive. By avoiding the turn over (compilation-packaging-deployment-navigation) after every change, it makes web development fun again.

This blog post explains how you can deploy your Play applications using Puppet. This allows you to develop web apps in a very productive way and deploy them reliably.
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Start developing Play! applications with Scala

The Play! Framework offers a new way to develop web applications. Relying on a stateless model, a light but complete stack and no big turnaround times for debugging, Play! makes developing Scala applications really efficient. akquinet is using Play! in several projects. But, what makes Play! even better and your development even more efficient is the Scala support. You can develop your application using the Scala language.

This blog post explains how to set up Play! and your development environment to develop web applications efficiently. It covers the Play framework and the Scala module installation, the integration inside the Eclipse IDE, the Source Code Management configuration and the deployment into Apache Tomcat and JBoss AS.

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