This is the terraform part of my try at getting a scaled n-tiers application to work inside Windows Server Core on Kubernetes. It spins up a Windows Server 2016 instance to build and push the images, then follow the steps below for the Kubernetes part.

The two related projects are TalkNotesBack and TalkNotesFront.

Here's the plan:

1. Create a multi-layer app
2. Put them in containers as in this deploying docker containers on Windows Server 2016 talk
3. Push them to an Azure Container Registry
4. Use ACS for Kubernetes + Windows to host them
5. ???
6. Profit!

The sources of the back-end and frontend services are downloaded and built using multi-stage docker images. Just switch to the C:\Sources\TalkNotesComposed directory and execute

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml build

Now let's push that image:

docker login ${container-registry-loginserver}

Where ${container-registry-loginserver} is one of the outputs of terraform. So are admin username and password. In the next lines I'm using a concrete value for it, but you get the gist:

docker tag talknotesback kubecontainerregistry.azurecr.io/scaled/talknotesback
docker tag talknotesfront kubecontainerregistry.azurecr.io/scaled/talknotesfront
docker push kubecontainerregistry.azurecr.io/scaled/talknotesback
docker push kubecontainerregistry.azurecr.io/scaled/talknotesfront

Now that the images are up, let's create an azure container service instance. From what I've read there's no generalized Windows support yet? Also, I had some issues using the service principal created for Terraform, so we're using the other credentials.

az login
az acs create --orchestrator-type=kubernetes --resource-group kubernetesdev --name=scaledSebugCluster --dns-prefix=sgk8scluster --agent-count=2 --generate-ssh-keys --windows --admin-username azureuser --admin-password $KUBERNETES_ADMIN_PASSWORD
az acs kubernetes get-credentials --resource-group=kubernetesdev --name=scaledSebugCluster

Since we have a private registry, we'll have to create a secret to pull it: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/pull-image-private-registry/

First, let's verify it works:

docker login kubecontainerregistry.azurecr.io

Now we can create the secret:

kubectl create secret docker-registry regsecret --docker-server=kubecontainerregistry.azurecr.io --docker-username=... --docker-password=... --docker-email=...

With all this in place we can spin up our deployment and services:

kubectl apply -f scaled-sample-deployment.yaml

There is still one annoying thing left: I didn't get DNS to work, so post the pods being up you'll have to run the following, replacing the pod ID as given:

kubectl get pods
kubectl exec talk-notes-front-2272407718-ktms7 -- powershell -Command '"http://$($env:TALKNOTESBACK_SERVICE_HOST):$($env:TALKNOTESBACK_SERVICE_PORT)/TalkNoteService.svc" > C:\\TalkNotesFront\\address.txt'

This kind of destroys the whole point so we'll have to work on doing this differently.