Understanding 'Always On' vs. Health Check in Azure App Service
The 'Always On' feature in Azure App Service helps keep your app warm by ensuring it remains running and responsive, even during periods of inactivity with no incoming traffic. As this feature pings to root URI after every 5 minutes. On Other hand Health-check feature helps pinging configured path every minute to monitor the application availability on each instance. What is 'Always On' in Azure App Service? The Always On feature ensures that the host process of your web app stays running continuously. This results in better responsiveness after idle periods since the app doesn’t need to cold boot when a request arrives. How to enable Always On: Navigate to the Azure Portal and open your Web App. Go to Configuration > General Settings. Toggle Always On to On. What is Health Check in Azure App Service? Health check increases your application's availability by rerouting requests away from instance where application is marked unhealthy and replacing instances if they remain unhealthy. How to enable Health-Check: Navigate to the Azure Portal and open your Web App. Under Monitoring, select Health check. Select Enable and provide a valid URL path for your application, such as /health or /api/health. Select Save. So, is it still necessary to enable the 'Always On' feature when Health Check is already pinging your application every minute? -> Yes, please find below explanation for the same. Test App scenario: Health Check enabled (pointing to /health_check path) and Always On disabled. Started the app and sent some user requests. Observations from the Test: After the application starts up, health check pings begin following the end user's request. Please find below table representing Health-check pings following user's request to root URI. Time Bucket URL Status Request Count 2025-03-20 07:00:00.0000000 / 200 6 2025-03-20 07:00:00.0000000 /health_check 200 30 2025-03-20 07:30:00.0000000 /health_check 200 30 Subsequent Health-check pings will continue, even in the absence of user requests. However, after restarting the app and in the absence of any user requests, we observed that Health Check requests were not initiated. This indicates that Health Check does not start automatically unless application is actively running and serving requests. Conclusion: Always On ensures that the app is proactively kept warm by sending root URI pings, even post-restart. The health-check feature is useful for monitoring application availability when the application is active. However, after a restart, if the application isn't active due to a lack of requests, Health-check pings won't initiate. Therefore, it is highly recommended to enable Always On, particularly for applications that need continuous availability and to avoid application process unload events. Recommendation: Enable Always On alongside Health Check to ensure optimal performance and reliability.Self Hosted AI Application on AKS in a day with KAITO and CoPilot.
In this blog post I document my experience of spending a full day using KAITO and Copilot to accelerate deployment and development of a self managed AI enabled chatbot deployed in a managed cluster. The goal is to showcase how quickly using a mix of AI tooling we can go from zero to a self hosted, tuned LLM and chatbot application. At the top of this article I want to share my perspective on the future of projects such as KAITO. At the moment I believe KAITO to be somewhat ahead of its time, as most enterprises begin adopting abstracted artificial intelligence it is brilliant to see projects like KAITO being developed ready for the eventual abstraction pendulum to swing back, motivated by usual factors such as increased skills in the market, cost and governance. Enterprises will undoubtedly in the future look to take centralised control of the AI models being used by their enterprises as GPU's become cheaper, more readily available and powerful. When this shift happens open source projects like KAITO will become common place in enterprises. It is also my opinion that Kubernetes lends itself perfectly to be the AI platform of the future a position shared by the CNCF (albeit both sources here may be somewhat biased). The resiliency, scaling and existence of Kuberentes primitives such as "Jobs" mean that Kubernetes is already the de-facto platform for machine learning training and inference. These same reasons also make Kuberentes the best underlying platform for AI development. Companies including DHL, Wayve and even OpenAI all run ML or AI workloads already on Kubernetes. That does not mean that Data Scientists and engineers will suddenly be creating Dockerfiles or exploring admission controllers, Kubernetes instead, as a platform will be multiple layers of abstraction away (Full scale self service platform engineering) however the engineers responsible for running and operating the platform will hail projects like KAITO.
Simplify Full-stack Java Development with JHipster Online, Terraform and Bicep
In the previous blog: Build and deploy full-stack Java Web Applications on Azure Container Apps with JHipster, we explored the fundamental features of JHipster Azure Container Apps. Specifically, we demonstrated how to create and deploy a project to Azure Container Apps in just a few steps. In this blog, we will introduce some new features in JHipster Azure Container Apps, which make project creation even simpler and deployment more seamless. JHipster Online: Quick Prototyping Made Easy JHipster Online is a quick prototyping website that allows you to generate a full-stack Spring Boot project without requiring any installation! You can start building your Azure project by clicking the Create Azure Application button. 🌟Generate the project Simply answer a few guided questions, and JHipster Online will generate a project ready for building and deployment. In the final step of the questionnaire, you can choose to generate either a Terraform or Bicep file for deployment. If you prefer using the CLI version, install it with the following command: npm install -g generator-jhipster-azure-container-apps You can run create the project with: jhipster-azure-container-apps 🚀Deploy the project 💚Terraform Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that allows you to build, modify, and version cloud and on-premises resources securely and efficiently. It supports a wide range of popular cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Docker. To deploy using Terraform, ensure that Terraform is selected during the project generation step. Additionally, you must have Terraform installed and properly configured. After generating the project, navigate to the Terraform folder: cd terraform Initialize Terraform by running the following command: terraform init Once finished, privision the necessary resource on Azure with: terraform apply -auto-approve Now you can deploy the project with: Linux/MacOS: .\deploy.sh You can run the deployment script by adding options subId, region and resourceGroupName. Windows: .\deploy.ps1 You will be prompted to provide subId, region, and resourceGroupName. ❤️Bicep Bicep is a domain-specific language that uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources. In order to deploy with Terraform, make sure you select Bicep in the project generation step. You may also need to have Azure CLI installed and configured. Once the project has been created, change into the Bicep folder: cd bicep Setup bicep with: az deployment sub create -f ./main.bicep --location=eastus2 --name jhipster-aca --only-show-errors Here you can replace the location and the name parameters with your own choices. Now you can deploy the project with: Linux/MacOS: .\deploy.sh You can run the deployment script by adding options subId, region and resourceGroupName. Windows: .\deploy.ps1 You will be prompted to provide subId, region, and resourceGroupName. 💛 Deploy from Source Code, Artifact and more In addition to the options mentioned, Azure Container Apps provides a wide range of deployment methods designed to suit diverse project needs. Whether you prefer deploying directly from source code, pre-built artifacts, or container images, Azure Container Apps streamlines the entire process with its robust built-in Java support. This enables developers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management. From integrating with popular CI/CD pipelines to leveraging advanced deployment techniques like Github, Azure Container Apps offers the flexibility to match your workflow. Discover how to effortlessly deploy and scale your project by visiting: Launch your first Java application in Azure Container Apps.
Next-Gen Customer Service: Azure's AI-Powered Speech, Translation and Summarization
Break down language barriers effortlessly! Dive into our upcoming demo showcasing the power of AI integration (client-side). Learn how to transcribe, translate, synthesize, and summarize conversations in real-time with Azure AI services. Stay tuned for an enlightening journey through seamless multilingual communication.Build a full-stack React application with Azure Static Web Apps and managed functions
React is the most popular framework for frontend web applications, and Azure Static Web Apps is the best place to host these applications on Azure. With Azure Static Web Apps’ built-in managed Azure Functions, you can build and host a full-stack web application using only Azure Static Web Apps (and there’s a free tier!).Announcing Distributed Functions (Preview) for Azure Static Web Apps
Today, we're announcing distributed functions for Azure Static Web Apps managed functions. With distributed functions, the managed functions of your static web app are distributed to regions of high request loads, improving your app performance, decreasing your network latency, and enhancing your request responsiveness.Building Static Web Apps with database connections: Best Practices
With the announcement of Static Web Apps' database connections feature, when should you use database connections versus building your own backend APIs? What is Data API builder and how does it relate to Static Web Apps' database connections feature? We cover these topics and more in this blog post.
