Add support for Azure Container Apps and DAPR.io

[MedAnd]

Hi Davide Mauri (@yorek), great to see MS adopting more support for GraphQL, which is especially prevalent in the retail technology landscape.

Please consider adding support for Azure Container Apps and DAPR.io

[Aaron Powell (aaronpowell)]

What sort of support would you be looking for those?

As DAB is available as a container image, you can deploy that to any of our container hosting options, AppService, Container Instances, Container Apps or even AKS.

We have this outlined in the /samples/azure for Container Instances, but the pattern would be the same for Container Apps (primarily it'd be changing the some of the CLI commands from the provided script to use az containerapp).

For Dapr, I only really have a surface level understanding of how to use it, could you provide an example of what you'd be looking for in Dapr integration?

[MedAnd]

Hi Aaron Powell (@aaronpowell) - maybe all that is needed is a GitHub example and docs, which show step by step how to host within Container Apps, and also call / use from other DAPR containers. Wondering if there is any special configuration required to have DAPR and GraphQL play nice?

[Aaron Powell (aaronpowell)]

Yes, a sample that shows Container Apps wouldn't be a difficult task, it's a case of porting the existing Azure sample to a different container host.

From memory Dapr can make HTTP calls between services, and assuming that I'm right about that, you could call it just like any other service couldn't you?

[MedAnd]

Wondering if a Dapr native GraphQL binding would be an option... so one approach is to simply host within Container Apps, but another is to deploy the data-api-builder along with the Dapr side car and expose the data-api-builder through Dapr, if that made sense?

Dapr GraphQL binding spec

[Aaron Powell (aaronpowell)]

Having a glance over that spec, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to do that, or you could use DAB's REST endpoints through Dapr's HTTP bindings - https://docs.dapr.io/reference/components-reference/supported-bindings/http/

[MedAnd]

If the example and docs could contain this scenario, I think this would be a win win win, for Container Apps / Dapr and data-api-builder adoption and end customers... I see great potential in combining, maybe packaging as part of modern Data Mesh services 🙂