Book Image

Serverless computing in Azure with .NET

Book Image

Serverless computing in Azure with .NET

Overview of this book

Serverless architecture allows you to build and run applications and services without having to manage the infrastructure. Many companies have started adopting serverless architecture for their applications to save cost and improve scalability. This book will be your companion in designing Serverless architecture for your applications using the .NET runtime, with Microsoft Azure as the cloud service provider. You will begin by understanding the concepts of Serverless architecture, its advantages and disadvantages. You will then set up the Azure environment and build a basic application using a sample text sentiment evaluation function. From here, you will be shown how to run services in a Serverless environment. We will cover the integration with other Azure and 3rd party services such as Azure Service Bus, as well as configuring dependencies on NuGet libraries, among other topics. After this, you will learn about debugging and testing your Azure functions, and then automating deployment from source control. Securing your application and monitoring its health will follow from there, and then in the final part of the book, you will learn how to Design for High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Scale, as well as how to take advantage of the cloud pay-as-you-go model to design cost-effective services. We will finish off with explaining how azure functions scale up against AWS Lambda, Azure Web Jobs, and Azure Batch compare to other types of compute-on-demand services. Whether you’ve been working with Azure for a while, or you’re just getting started, by the end of the book you will have all the information you need to set up and deploy applications to the Azure Serverless Computing environment.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating the function


Let's take a look at the following steps to create the function:

  1. In Solution Explorer, right-click the project, choose Add -> New Item -> Azure Function, and enter ScoreText in the name. This will be the name of the .cs file that defines the function.
  2. In the next dialog, fill the following parameters:
    • Function type: HttpTrigger
    • AccessRights: Anonymous
    • FunctionName: ScoreText
  1. Click on Create.

You will see the ScoreText.cs file appear in the project tree.

Running the function locally

The function code is provided next. The auto-generated code implements the same behavior as we've seen in the HelloWorld function created online, however, you will notice a few differences in code. The differences exist because the online function was a C# script ( CSX ) based function.

The Visual Studio "precompiled" function template has references to a number of system libraries and the Azure.WebJobs libraries, and the function's Run method is annotated with attributes. The FunctionName attribute...