We now begin to transfer our microservices-based application to the Azure cloud utilizing its Azure Container Service offerings.

Azure subscription

First of all, we need to have an Azure subscription, so, if you do not have one, create one. You can have 200$ free to use for one month on anything on Azure the first time you create your Azure account. If you are a Visual Studio subscriber, you can have 50$ to 150$ per month of Azure credit to spend on. Similarly, if you are an MSDN platform subscriber, you get 100$ per month of Azure credit.

In addition to some of the afore mentioned options, there is also a plan called Visual Studio Dev Essentials. This plan is basically to attract non-Microsoft developers to try various MS tools, and it gives you a 25$ monthly credit to try on Azure for a year.

25$ is more than enough to try our ACS sample application; be sure to destroy all of your ACS resources once you have successfully completed your experimentation. If, for some reason, you do not want to destroy the ACS resources immediately, then you can stop and deallocate all the VMs allocated in your ACS service using, for example, the Azure Portal. In our example, we will have 3 VMs allocated.

Creating Azure Container Service

Now we need the Azure Container Service to execute our microservices containers.

For our sample in ACS, we create a Docker Swarm-based orchestrator with one master node and two agent nodes. Please follow the instructions given earlier in the section Setup in Azure Container Service under Technical Architecture to create the ACS for our sample. Although creating ACS via the Azure portal is self-explanatory, you can additionally follow the step-by-step guide as mentioned previously in the Hands-on Prerequisites section.

It takes a few minutes to create your ACS resources. For our sample, we name our Azure resource group as RG_ACS_EABook_Example. After the ACS is created successfully, it looks similar to the screenshot here:

Note that the resources you see in this screenshot are mentioned nicely and explained a bit in the Network Architecture section previously. Please refer to it now to have a fresh picture again in your head.

In the last screenshot, you can see Deployment History, which is shown right after your successful ACS deployment, or you can have the same view when you go to the Deployment option in your newly created resource group. The name of the deployment usually looks something like microsoft.acs-2017123456789. It may look a little different for you depending on the names given by you, but the private network, internal IPs, ports, and general accessibility look the same as mentioned in the preceding Network Diagram: