Background
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the developer communities and user groups have been forced to conduct their regular session in a virtual manner. This has provided a great opportunity for organizers and speakers from across the globe to speak at community events and rope in speakers from different parts of the world. This might not have been possible in case of physical events.
I have been speaking at the local community events in Singapore as well as other parts of Asia for the past 3-4 years. Recently, I got opportunity to speak at the virtual meetup across the globe for the Microsoft Cloud South Florida user group.
It started off with a Tweet from Julie Larman that she is getting multiple requests for speaking opportunities but could not fulfil all. She suggested the organizers can extend the opportunities to others who might be interested and available to speak. I thought it was a good opportunity and replied to her tweet. The thread got picked up by Dave Noderer and we managed to set up a virtual meetup in no time.
Scaling .Net Core Containers with Event Driven Worksloads
I have presented the topic of autoscaling container using KEDA on multiple occasions in the past for different meetups and events in Asia. I also have a 3 part series on my recently launched YouTube channel about this. The duration of the meetup was 90 minutes and that provided me with an opportunity to do a deep dive on some of the topics which are not possible in a 45 minutes or 1 hour session.
The application I used in the demo is a dummy events management application called Tech Talks. There is a ASP.Net Core WebAPI which exposes a method to generate random events. These events are pumped into a RabbitMQ queue. We have a .Net Core exe which consumes these messages in a batch. It is the consumer which we use to showcase the autoscaling capabilities using an upcoming project called Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling (KEDA).
During the session, I demonstrated the following features
- Containerize .Net Core Web API and executable using Dockerfile
- Build and Publish docker images to a private container registry (Azure Container Registry)
- Use Docker-compose to multiple services
- Use YAML files to describe Kubernetes deployments
- Provision AKS cluster using an idempotent Powershell script
- Deploy RabbitMQ cluster using Helm charts
- Deploy application containers to Kubernetes
- Auto scale RabbitMQ consumer using KEDA
- Extend the scaling capabilities to serverless Azure Container Instances (ACI) using Virtual Node
By the end of the session, we have expanded the containers to be auto scaled on to serverless Azure Container Instances (ACI) using Virtual Node.
YouTube video recording
The recording of this talk is now available on YouTube
Slides
The slides used during the session are available on
Source code
The source code is available in GitHub repository.
Conclusion
The session provided me an opportunity to speak for the first time across the globe. I like to attend in-person events as it helps a great deal to network with people. In a virtual event sometimes you feel like you are talking to a screen. It is difficult to gauge the reaction of the audience in virtual event.
One of the benefits of a virtual event is that we can focus more on the content delivery without getting distracted which could sometimes happen in a in-person event. Depending on which platform or communication tool is used (YouTube live stream / MS Teams/ Zoom etc) the question and answers can be handled separately. Aonther great advantage of virtual event is the ability to record it and share it on platforms like YouTube. People who could not attend due to timezone differences or due to emergencies can find these recording useful.
Until next time, Code with Passion and Strive for Excellence.
Until next time, Code with Passion and Strive for Excellence.
