Deploy an application onto an Azure Container Instance

Waypoint's Azure Container Instances (ACI) plugin works with Azure Container Instances to run containers on Azure's cloud infrastructure. In this tutorial, you will deploy build, deploy and release a sample project to ACI.

Prerequisites

You'll need to install the waypoint binary locally, clone the examples repository (detailed in the next section), login to Azure, create a container registry, and set a few environment variables.

Clone the examples repository

The code for this tutorial is in the hashicorp/waypoint-examples repository. Clone the repository with git.

$ git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/waypoint-examples.git

Navigate to the subdirectory for the Azure Container Instance project. This project uses NodeJS but the following instructions will work with any language that can be built with a cloud native buildpack.

$ cd waypoint-examples/azure/azure-container-instance/nodejs

Login to Azure locally

Install the Azure CLI and login. Your web browser will open to the Azure website.

$ az login

Create an Azure Container Registry

You'll need to create an Azure Container Registry to store your Docker images.

Visit the Azure Container Registry page. Click the "Add" button and fill out the form to create a new registry. You can use the default resource group or any that is available to you. Use the name waypointregistry or any alphanumeric name that has not been taken.

Leave this window open so you can reference it later.

Two more steps are needed. Run the acr update command to update the permissions on the registry.

$ az acr update -n waypointregistry --admin-enabled true

Now, login to the Azure Container Registry.

$ az acr login --name waypointregistry

Set environment variables

You must set three environment variables to successfully push a Docker image to the registry and deploy an application that uses it.

The first is your AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID.

$ export AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID="aaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaa"

The next two are a name and password for the Container Registry. Return to the container registry screen from the previous section. Find the "Access Keys" menu item. On the configuration screen is a username and two passwords.

Copy the username to your clipboard. Set a local environment variable named REGISTRY_USERNAME. This is an environment variable defined by the Waypoint ACI plugin.

$ export REGISTRY_USERNAME="waypointuser"

Then, copy either password (there are two). Set a local environment variable named REGISTRY_PASSWORD.

$ export REGISTRY_PASSWORD="aaaaaa"

You have now completed the configuration needed to continue to the other steps in this tutorial.

Install the local Waypoint server

Install the Waypoint server to your local Docker instance. It will not run on ACI so you can run it locally on Docker.

$ waypoint install --platform=docker -accept-tos

If you run into any errors, refer to the troubleshooting page which has instructions for resetting the Waypoint server in Docker.

Configure waypoint

The waypoint-examples git repository you cloned earlier contains a waypoint.hcl file with configuration details for ACI.

Here are a few snippets that relate to Azure. The full configuration is displayed further down.

In the build section, use the standard docker plugin but specify the URL to your Azure registry and the example-nodejs Docker image. Edit this to match the name of the Azure Container Registry you created earlier.

use "docker" {
  image = "waypointregistry.azurecr.io/example-nodejs"
  tag   = "latest"
}

The second relevant section is the deploy stanza. In addition to defining the resource_group and location, there is a section for the capacity of the compute instance.

Other arguments are possible, including those for mounting a disk volume or passing static_environment variables to the application. Refer to the ACI plugin documentation for a list of other arguments.

deploy {
  use "azure-container-instance" {
    resource_group = "DefaultResourceGroup-EUS"
    location       = "eastus"
    ports          = [8080]

    capacity {
      memory    = "512"
      cpu_count = 1
    }

  }
}

The entire waypoint.hcl looks like this.

project = "example-nodejs"

app "example-nodejs" {
  labels = {
    "service" = "example-nodejs",
    "env"     = "dev"
  }

  build {
    use "pack" {}
    registry {
      use "docker" {
        image = "waypointregistry.azurecr.io/example-nodejs"
        tag   = "latest"
      }
    }
  }

  deploy {
    use "azure-container-instance" {
      resource_group = "DefaultResourceGroup-EUS"
      location       = "eastus"
      ports          = [8080]

      capacity {
        memory    = "512"
        cpu_count = 1
      }

    }
  }

}

Initialize Waypoint

Once you have written the waypoint.hcl configuration file, initialize the Waypoint context.

$ waypoint init

Run waypoint up

Now, build, deploy, and release the application with up.

$ waypoint up

It make take a few minutes to copy the Docker images to the server. When it completes, the output will display a URL to your web application.

You can also verify the server side by visiting the Azure portal. Search for "Azure Container Instance." You will see the example-nodejs instance with a CPU usage chart and other details.

Destroy the deployment

After you have completed this tutorial, you can destroy the container instance.

$ waypoint destroy -auto-approve

Next steps

Read the plugin API documentation for more details.

Learn more about Waypoint by following along with the other tutorials for AWS, Azure, and others, or read the documentation for other Waypoint plugins.