Azure PaaS is Dead - Death by Container

One of Azure's big initial innovations was their PaaS platforms.  These services were a level up from most of Amazon's offerings.

Microsoft appears to be in the process of killing of their traditional offerings. They are instead exposing the containerized underpinnings and forcing customers to do their own packaging and Docker image construction.  This makes sense for large enterprises but means that teams need to understand the underlying O/S software modules and system components that may need to be installed in their containers.

PaaS

PaaS makes it easier for less sophisticated teams to deploy sophisticated scalable applications. Azure PaaS lets customers deploy applications without worrying about the Operating System, System Patching, CVE security scanning , load balancing, log aggregation, or other issues.  The opacity of the underlying system meant teams had to know less and that teams couldn't know more if they wanted too.

Microsoft modernized much of their PaaS platform by providing additional isolation via Docker Containers and Kubernetes that is hidden under the surface of the PaaS offering. It looks like their future plans are based on having users manage their Docker images and containers themselves.

Azure App Services on GitHub have been disabled

Most of the Azure App Service repositories have been archived with no information about what happened or links to go-forward guidance.  This means Microsoft is no longer updating the _hidden_ Docker containers that the PaaS services are deployed into for many of the languages.
As of 2020 Archived projects include
  • Node
  • Ruby
  • PHP
  • Tomcat
  • Wildfly
  • Java

Microsoft's View of PaaS and IaaS

Kubernetes deployed models require a skill set somewhere between IaaS and PaaS. Some parts are as complicated as full IaaS Companies don't own the O/S but they do own patching and scanning of containers that are virtually mini-operating systems.

Three Different Azure Services

These services expose the Kubernetes Underpinnings. They require that you create your own Docker images for deployment.  Docker Images are not being updated for any of these that can take deployments without your own container.
  • AZURE APP SERVICE - LINUX
  • AZURE CONTAINER SERVICE - LINUX
  • AZURE SERVICE FABRIC - LINUX
My conclusions are based on my effort at deploying the Java Tika document parsing jar in Azure in the same way I did with AWS beanstalk.  This article describes the experience Exploring Docker on Azure PaaS with Tika

Archived repositories added 2020/09/28

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