Exercise - Discover your ASP.NET web application

  • 6 minutes

In this exercise, we use the Azure Migrate: App Containerization tool to discover the PartsUnlimited application that needs to be containerized and migrated.

Complete tool prerequisites

  1. Select ASP.NET web apps as the type of application you want to containerize.

  2. To specify target Azure service, select Containers on Azure App Service.

    Default load-up for App Containerization tool.

  3. Accept the license terms, and read the license information.

  4. The tool automatically checks for internet connectivity and installs the latest version of the Azure Migrate: App Containerization tool.

  5. Select verify to validate the installation of the Microsoft Web Deploy tool. Microsoft Web Deploy is already installed as part of the setup.

  6. The tool instructs you to enable PowerShell remoting that was done as part of the setup. Select continue.

Sign in to Azure

Select Sign in to sign in to your Azure account.

  1. You need a device code to authenticate with Azure. Selecting on sign-in opens a modal with the device code.
  2. Select Copy code & sign in to copy the device code and open an Azure sign-in prompt in a new browser tab. If it doesn't appear, make sure the pop-up blocker in the browser is disabled.
  3. On the new tab, paste the device code and complete the sign in using your Azure account credentials. You can close the browser tab after sign in is complete and return to the App Containerization tool's web interface.
  4. Select the Azure tenant that you want to use.
  5. Specify the Azure subscription that you want to use.

Discover ASP.NET applications

The App Containerization helper tool connects remotely to the application servers using the provided credentials. It attempts to discover ASP.NET applications hosted on the application servers.

  1. To discover the PartsUnlimited application, use the following values.

    • Server IP/FQDN: In your LearnAppContainerization resource group, navigate to vm-aspserver, copy the private IP address and specify this value in the App Containerization tool.
    • Credentials: Specify .\adminuser as the user name and Password@123 as the password.

  2. Select Validate to verify that the application server is reachable from the machine running the tool and that the credentials are valid. Upon successful validation, the status column shows the status as Mapped.

    Screenshot for server IP and credentials.

  3. Select Continue to start application discovery on the selected application servers.

  4. Upon successful completion of application discovery, you can select the list of applications to containerize.

    Screenshot for discovered ASP.NET application.

  5. Use the checkbox to select the PartsUnlimited application to containerize.

  6. Specify container name: Specify a name for the target container for each selected application. The container name should be specified as <name:tag> where the tag is used for container image. For example, you can specify the target container name as partsunlimitedtest:v1.

Parameterize application configurations

By Parameterizing the configuration, you make it available as a deployment time parameter. This parameter allows you to configure the setting while deploying the application as opposed to having it hard-coded to a specific value in the container image. For example, this option is useful for parameters like database connection strings.

  1. Select app configurations to review detected configurations.

  2. Select the checkbox to parameterize the configuration with attribute name DefaultConnectionString.

  3. Select Apply after selecting the configurations to parameterize.

    Screenshot for app configuration parameterization ASP.NET application.

Externalize file system dependencies

You can add other folders that your application uses. Specify if they should be part of the container image or are to be externalized through persistent volumes on Azure file share. Using persistent volumes works great for stateful applications that store state outside the container or have other static content stored on the file system.

This application doesn't have any file system dependencies that need to be externalized. Select Continue to proceed to the container image build phase.