In the competitive realm of modern business, the ability to deploy and manage applications efficiently is essential for success. As organizations strive to stay ahead, leveraging advanced deployment strategies becomes a critical factor. Deploying a .NET application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using Helm charts and an ingress controller provides a scalable, resilient, and secure environment for your application. We will walk you through the process of deploying a .NET application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using VMs, a load balancer, and an Ingress Controller. This setup ensures a scalable, resilient, and secure environment for your application, leveraging the benefits of load balancing and global routing.

Objective

This blog will delve into how deploying a .NET application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with virtual machines, a load balancer, Helm charts, and an ingress controller can significantly enhance your operational efficiency. By adopting this approach, businesses can ensure high availability, scalability, and streamlined management, ultimately driving better performance and growth.

Why use AKS for .NET Applications?

Enterprise solutions that are both scalable and high-performing are frequently built using .NET apps. Containerised application deployment, maintenance, and scaling are made easier with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which provides a managed Kubernetes environment. Leveraging AKS allows businesses to:

• Scale Applications Efficiently: AKS allows you to easily scale your .NET applications to meet varying demands. Whether it’s handling peak traffic or expanding your application’s reach, AKS offers automatic scaling to match your workload.
• Developer Productivity: By using AKS, developers can leverage modern development practices like DevOps, CI/CD, and containerization, leading to faster development cycles, easier updates, and more reliable deployments.
• Integration with Azure Services: AKS seamlessly integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure DevOps for CI/CD pipelines, Azure Monitor for logging and monitoring, and Azure Active Directory for identity management. This integration helps streamline the development and deployment processes.
• Support for Microservices: AKS is ideal for modern microservices architectures, allowing you to deploy, manage, and scale your .NET applications as independent services. This approach improves agility and enables continuous deployment.
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery: AKS provides built-in high availability and disaster recovery options, ensuring your .NET applications remain resilient and available, even in the face of failures.

The Role of Helm Charts

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that simplifies application deployment and management.

How Helm Charts Enhance Business Agility:

• Faster Time to Market: Accelerate the release of new features and apps by streamlining complicated modifications and deployments.
• Reduced Errors: Predefined configurations reduce the possibility of human error, resulting in deployments that are more dependable and predictable.
• Ease of Management: Save time and effort by using simple commands to manage complicated deployments.

Leveraging Ingress Controllers

Ingress Controllers manage external access to services within a Kubernetes cluster.

How Ingress Controllers Enhance Business Agility:

• Flexible Traffic Management: Simple traffic management and routing to various services provide easy upgrades and scalability.
• Improved Security: Using SSL/TLS and other security features, you can safeguard your apps from threats and ensure compliance.
• Optimized Performance: Effective traffic balancing allows to maintenance of optimal availability and performance even during peak loads.

Solution Approach

1. We will create a .NET application, and containerize it using Docker.
2. Push the images to Azure Container Registry (ACR).
3. Then, it’ll be deployed to AKS using Helm charts.
4. We will also set up an ingress controller to manage external access to the application.

Prerequisites

1. Azure Subscription
2. Azure CLI
3. Kubectl
4. Helm
5. Docker
6. .NET SDK

Solution/Steps-by-Step Procedure

Step 1: Set Up Your .NET Application

• Create a New .NET Application:
  

  dotnet new webapi -o MyDotNetApp

• Build and Run Locally:
  

  cd MyDotNetAp dotnet build dotnet run

• Create a Dockerfile:

  FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:5.0 ASP base
  WORKDIR /app
  EXPOSE 80
  FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:5.0 AS build
  WORKDIR /src
  COPY . .
  RUN dotnet restore
  RUN dotnet publish -c Release -o /app
  FROM base AS final
  WORKDIR /app
  COPY --from=build /app .
  ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "MyDotNetApp.dll"]

• Build the Docker Image:

  docker build -t mydotnetapp:latest .

Step 2: Push the Docker Image to Azure Container Registry (ACR)

• Login to Azure:

  az login

• Create an Azure Container Registry (ACR):

  az acr create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MyACR --sku Standard

• Login to ACR:

  az acr login --name MyACR

• Tag and Push the Image:

  docker tag mydotnetapp:latest MyACR.azurecr.io/mydotnetapp:latest
  docker push MyACR.azurecr.io/mydotnetapp:latest

Step 3: Set Up AKS

• Create an AKS Cluster:

  az aks create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MyAKSCluster --node-vm-size Standard_DS2_v2 --node-count 2 --enable-vmss --generate-ssh-keys

• Get AKS Credentials:

  az aks get-credentials --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MyAKSCluster

• Verify Connection:

  kubectl get nodes

Step 4: Configure Ingress Controller

• An ingress controller is a specialized load balancer for Kubernetes, managing external access to the services in a cluster, typically via HTTP/HTTPS.
• The ingress controller watches the Kubernetes API for Ingress resources and updates its configuration accordingly.
• NGINX is a popular choice for an ingress controller due to its robustness and support for advanced routing features.

Install NGINX Ingress Controller:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/controller-v1.9.4/deploy/static/provider/cloud/deploy.yaml

Step 5: Deploy with Helm

• • Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that allows developers to define, install, and upgrade complicated Kubernetes applications. Helm leverages a package mode known as charts, which are collections of files that define a specific set of Kubernetes resources. Helm charts enable easy management of your application deployments, versioning, and rollback capabilities.
  • Helm chart consist of:
    Chart.yaml: Contains metadata about the chart.values.yaml: Holds default configuration values for the chart.templates: A directory containing Kubernetes manifest files.
  • Install the helm :

    curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

  • Create a Helm Chart:

    helm create mydotnetapp

  • Update the Helm Chart:

    image:
      repository: MyACR.azurecr.io/mydotnetapp
      tag: latest

  • Deploy the Helm Chart:

    helm install mydotnetapp ./mydotnetapp

Step 6: Configure Ingress Service Separately

• An ingress resource specifies how external HTTP/HTTPS traffic is routed to services within the Kubernetes cluster.. This is typically managed by an ingress controller which processes these rules and handles the traffic.
• Create an Ingress Resource File (ingress_service.yaml):

  apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
  kind: Ingress
  metadata:
  name: mydotnetapp-ingress
  annotations:
  kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
  spec:
  rules:
  - host: mydotnetapp.example.com
  http:
   paths:
   - path: /
   pathType: Prefix
   backend:
   service:
   name: mydotnetapp-service
   port:
   number: 80

• Apply the Ingress Resource:

  kubectl apply -f ingress_service.yaml

Step 7: Access Your Application

• Get the Ingress IP:

  kubectl get svc -o wide -w --namespace ingress-nginx

Debugging

If you face any problems, take the following into consideration:

• Ensure all Kubernetes pods are running: kubectl get pods -A
• Check the logs of the failing pods: kubectl logs <pod-name>
• Verify the ingress rules and services are correctly configured.

Benefits for Businesses

Deploying .NET applications on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using Helm Charts and an Ingress Controller offers numerous benefits to businesses, enabling them to stay competitive and responsive in a rapidly evolving market.

• Agility
  • Rapid Deployment and Scaling: Businesses can quickly deploy, update, and scale .NET applications to meet the demands of the market. The combination of Helm Charts and AKS enables automated deployments, reducing the time needed to push updates or roll out new features. This agility is crucial for responding to market trends, customer feedback, and emerging opportunities.
  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Integrating Helm Charts with CI/CD pipelines allows for seamless updates, ensuring that new features and bug fixes are rolled out with minimal downtime. This accelerates time-to-market and fosters innovation.
• Efficiency
  • Cost Reduction: By automating deployment processes and minimizing manual intervention, businesses can reduce operational costs. AKS’s self-healing and auto-scaling features maximize resource utilization even further and guarantee that you only pay for what you use.
  • Increased Productivity: Instead of overseeing infrastructure, developers can concentrate on creating and innovating. Helm Charts standardize the deployment process, reducing the chances of human error and ensuring that environments are consistent across development, testing, and production.

• Reliability
  • High Availability: AKS ensures that .NET applications are highly available, with built-in redundancy and failover capabilities. The use of an Ingress Controller further enhances reliability by managing traffic routing and balancing loads across multiple instances of an application.
  • Improved Security: Helm Charts can include security configurations, such as network policies and secret management, ensuring that applications are deployed with security best practices in place. AKS integrates with Azure’s security features, providing end-to-end protection for your applications.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you have successfully deployed your .NET application on AKS using Helm charts and an ingress controller. This setup provides a robust environment for your application, leveraging the capabilities of Kubernetes and Azure. Business agility is greatly increased by integrating AKS, Helm Charts, and Ingress Controllers into your deployment strategy. Use these technologies to build a more flexible and efficient IT infrastructure that will position your business for long-term success.