Container Apps for microservices in Azure - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Container Apps for microservices

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple microservices architecture using Azure Container Apps. Each microservice will run in its own container and communicate internally. This setup helps your app scale easily and stay reliable.

🎯 Goal: Create an Azure Container Apps environment, define two container apps representing microservices, and configure them to communicate internally.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an Azure Container Apps environment named microservices-env

Create a container app named frontend-app with image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/containerapps-helloworld:latest

Create a container app named backend-app with image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/containerapps-helloworld:latest

Configure frontend-app to call backend-app internally using the internal FQDN

Set CPU to 0.5 and memory to 1Gi for both container apps

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Microservices architectures are common in cloud applications to improve scalability and maintainability. Azure Container Apps provide a simple way to deploy and manage these microservices.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and developers use container apps to deploy microservices efficiently. Knowing how to configure environments, container apps, and internal communication is essential for modern cloud infrastructure roles.

1

Create the Container Apps environment

Create an Azure Container Apps environment named microservices-env in resource group myResourceGroup in location eastus. Use the Azure CLI command az containerapp env create with the exact parameters.

Azure

# Your code here to create the container apps environment

Need a hint?

Use az containerapp env create with --name, --resource-group, and --location options.

2

Create the frontend container app

Create a container app named frontend-app in resource group myResourceGroup inside environment microservices-env. Use image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/containerapps-helloworld:latest. Set CPU to 0.5 and memory to 1Gi. Use the Azure CLI command az containerapp create with the exact parameters.

Azure

az containerapp env create --name microservices-env --resource-group myResourceGroup --location eastus
# Your code here to create the frontend container app

Need a hint?

Use az containerapp create with --name frontend-app, --environment microservices-env, and resource group.

3

Create the backend container app

Create a container app named backend-app in resource group myResourceGroup inside environment microservices-env. Use image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/containerapps-helloworld:latest. Set CPU to 0.5 and memory to 1Gi. Use the Azure CLI command az containerapp create with the exact parameters.

Azure

az containerapp env create --name microservices-env --resource-group myResourceGroup --location eastus
az containerapp create --name frontend-app --resource-group myResourceGroup --environment microservices-env --image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/containerapps-helloworld:latest --cpu 0.5 --memory 1Gi
# Your code here to create the backend container app

Need a hint?

Use az containerapp create with --name backend-app, --environment microservices-env, and resource group.

4

Configure frontend to call backend internally

Update the frontend-app container app to set an environment variable named BACKEND_URL with the internal FQDN of backend-app. Use the Azure CLI command az containerapp update with the exact parameters. The internal FQDN format is http://backend-app.microservices-env.

Azure

az containerapp env create --name microservices-env --resource-group myResourceGroup --location eastus
az containerapp create --name frontend-app --resource-group myResourceGroup --environment microservices-env --image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/containerapps-helloworld:latest --cpu 0.5 --memory 1Gi
az containerapp create --name backend-app --resource-group myResourceGroup --environment microservices-env --image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/containerapps-helloworld:latest --cpu 0.5 --memory 1Gi
# Your code here to update frontend-app environment variable

Need a hint?

Use az containerapp update with --set-env-vars BACKEND_URL=http://backend-app.microservices-env.