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Tutorial: Create container images on a Linux Service Fabric cluster

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This tutorial is part one of a tutorial series that demonstrates how to use containers in a Linux Service Fabric cluster. In this tutorial, a multi-container application is prepared for use with Service Fabric. In subsequent tutorials, these images are used as part of a Service Fabric application. In this tutorial you learn how to:

  • Clone application source from GitHub
  • Create a container image from the application source
  • Deploy an Azure Container Registry (ACR) instance
  • Tag a container image for ACR
  • Upload the image to ACR

In this tutorial series, you learn how to:

Prerequisites

  • Linux development environment set up for Service Fabric. Follow the instructions here to set up your Linux environment.
  • This tutorial requires that you are running the Azure CLI version 2.0.4 or later. Run az --version to find the version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install the Azure CLI.
  • Additionally, it requires that you have an Azure subscription available. For more information on a free trial version, go here.

Get application code

The sample application used in this tutorial is a voting app. The application consists of a front-end web component and a back-end Redis instance. The components are packaged into container images.

Use git to download a copy of the application to your development environment.

git clone https://github.com/Azure-Samples/service-fabric-containers.git

cd service-fabric-containers/Linux/container-tutorial/

The solution contains two folders and a 'docker-compose.yml' file. The 'azure-vote' folder contains the Python frontend service along with the Dockerfile used to build the image. The 'Voting' directory contains the Service Fabric application package that is deployed to the cluster. These directories contain the necessary assets for this tutorial.

Create container images

Inside the azure-vote directory, run the following command to build the image for the front-end web component. This command uses the Dockerfile in this directory to build the image.

docker build -t azure-vote-front .

Note

If you are getting permission denied then follow this documentation on how to work with docker without sudo.

This command can take some time since all the necessary dependencies need to be pulled from Docker Hub. When completed, use the docker images command to see the azure-vote-front image you just created.

docker images

Deploy Azure Container Registry

First run the az login command to sign in to your Azure account.

az login

Next, use the az account command to choose your subscription to create the Azure Container registry. You have to enter the subscription ID of your Azure subscription in place of <subscription_id>.

az account set --subscription <subscription_id>

When deploying an Azure Container Registry, you first need a resource group. An Azure resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed.

Create a resource group with the az group create command. In this example, a resource group named myResourceGroup is created in the westus region.

az group create --name <myResourceGroup> --location westus

Create an Azure Container registry with the az acr create command. Replace <acrName> with the name of the container registry you want to create under your subscription. This name must be alphanumeric and unique.

az acr create --resource-group <myResourceGroup> --name <acrName> --sku Basic --admin-enabled true

Throughout the rest of this tutorial, we use "acrName" as a placeholder for the container registry name that you chose. Please make note of this value.

Sign in to your container registry

Sign in to your ACR instance before pushing images to it. Use the az acr login command to complete the operation. Provide the unique name given to the container registry when it was created.

az acr login --name <acrName>

The command returns a 'Login Succeeded’ message once completed.

Tag container images

Each container image needs to be tagged with the loginServer name of the registry. This tag is used for routing when pushing container images to an image registry.

To see a list of current images, use the docker images command.

docker images

Output:

REPOSITORY                   TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED              SIZE
azure-vote-front             latest              052c549a75bf        About a minute ago   913MB

To get the loginServer name, run the following command:

az acr show --name <acrName> --query loginServer --output table

This outputs a table with the following results. This result will be used to tag your azure-vote-front image before pushing it to the container registry in the next step.

Result
------------------
<acrName>.azurecr.io

Now, tag the azure-vote-front image with the loginServer of your container registry. Also, add :v1 to the end of the image name. This tag indicates the image version.

docker tag azure-vote-front <acrName>.azurecr.io/azure-vote-front:v1

Once tagged, run 'docker images' to verify the operation.

Output:

REPOSITORY                             TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
azure-vote-front                       latest              052c549a75bf        23 minutes ago      913MB
<acrName>.azurecr.io/azure-vote-front  v1                  052c549a75bf        23 minutes ago      913MB

Push images to registry

Push the azure-vote-front image to the registry.

Using the following example, replace the ACR loginServer name with the loginServer from your environment.

docker push <acrName>.azurecr.io/azure-vote-front:v1

The docker push commands take a couple of minutes to complete.

List images in registry

To return a list of images that have been pushed to your Azure Container registry, use the az acr repository list command. Update the command with the ACR instance name.

az acr repository list --name <acrName> --output table

Output:

Result
----------------
azure-vote-front

At tutorial completion, the container image has been stored in a private Azure Container Registry instance. This image is deployed from ACR to a Service Fabric cluster in subsequent tutorials.

Next steps

In this tutorial, an application was pulled from GitHub and container images were created and pushed to a registry. The following steps were completed:

  • Clone application source from GitHub
  • Create a container image from the application source
  • Deploy an Azure Container Registry (ACR) instance
  • Tag a container image for ACR
  • Upload the image to ACR

Advance to the next tutorial to learn about packaging containers into a Service Fabric application using Yeoman.

Package and deploy containers as a Service Fabric application