Publish ASP.NET MVC Project via Docker Container in Azure Service Fabric solution

Question

This quite a basic question. Microsoft advertises everywhere the lift and shift approach, meaning you can move old ASP.NET MVC projects (Cloud Service Webroles) into Docker Containers for a first publish on Service Fabric (SF) and only transform them later into native ASP.NET Core.

Unfortunately there is nowhere a throughout description how to do it:

• First example Lift and Shift: Microsoft's main advertisement to place old Webprojects into a container. But they only use some special "continuous delivery" approach for publishing which does not help.
• Approach with VS Docker Compose support: Only how to publish a single container as self-contained application. But it does not allow to embed the container into a whole SF Project with other services. Moreover it does NOT work with the Docker-Compose created in 1. 1 executes on my machine, can be sent to and somehow executed on the cluster. But a webapp is still not reachable from outside.
• Tutorial how to containerize and include container into SF Solution: The right direction with including the container into a solution. Unfortunately, the webproject they containerize is not a full scale ASP.NET Webproject. It is only a single python script. Therefore they can easily create a docker file in this case.
• ASP.Net Core Docker Tutorial from the Docker docs: Here is explained how to create a container, more complex than a single python script. But still, this tutorial only features a ASP.NET Core project and uses a "dotnet publish" instruction which does not exist in original ASP.NET!?
• All other tutorials for migrating ASP.NET MVC apps from old Cloud Services to SF unfortunately just explain the immediate upgrade to ASP.NET Core (eg. Here and here)

I am lost. I think the strategy should be to write an own docker file and create a container manually as in 4 and to then follow 3 to embedd this container into a SF solution. In the end the question is: How do you write the Dockerfile to containerize an ASP.NET MVC project?

Answer 1

Answering the end question first: An example of a dockerfile for an ASP.NET MVC:

FROM microsoft/aspnet:4.6.2
WORKDIR /inetpub/wwwroot
COPY /publish .

That will copy the Web Publish output from the /publish directory to your container.

To expand a bit on the links you put in above, there are some concepts around containers that are important:

• Docker file (a file that describes how to build a container)
• Docker compose (a file that can describe how to build and run multiple container) - not required for single containers
• Docker host (a service that runs on an OS and can pull container images and run them)
• Container Registry (where container images live and get's pulled from when a docker host need to run them)
• Visual Studio Container Tooling (helps you create docker file and docker compose files and integrates with the docker host to debug and run containers locally)
• CI integration you refer to in bullet one above (Visual Studio Team Services and Visual Studio helping you to configure how to build the container and push it to a container registry)
• Orchestrators (Fancy multi node stuff to run containers in a cloudy-like fashion. Gives you reliability and scale when running multiple containers in a solution - aka clusters of nodes - Service Fabric and Kubernetes are options here).

Putting the above in the light of your four bullets above:

• Lift and Shift: Meant as an easy end-to-end solution where CI/CD pipelines are created for you. Incorporates all of the above. There is a video here walking through this scenario from the first link above: https://channel9.msdn.com/events/Build/2017/T6001.
• Approach with VS Docker Compose support: Used by the above to manually push a docker compose file to Service Fabric, which instructs Service Fabric to pull and run the containers from a container registry.
• Tutorial how to containerize and include container into SF Solution: Explains how to achieve this without using docker compose or Visual Studio (which is your choice)
• ASP.Net Core Docker Tutorial from the Docker docs: Just how to build a container.

Answer 2

One sidemark for others wanting to build the automatically created dockerfile manually:

The .dockerignore file, which is also autogenerated ignores everything but the obj\Docker folder. If you publish manually and your publish folder is different, this is the reason why your references might be not found although you set them up correctly in the dockerfile.

Answer 3

Another hint:

When publishing a solution on your own cluster pay attention, that you have to manually setup the forwarding rules in the load balancer. Per default only port 19000 and 19080 are forwarded. This is not mentioned in any of the tutorials. You somehow only find the info to add balancing rules within the in depth explanations.