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

Continuous delivery for functions


Now that our TextEvaluation project source code is in source control, we can configure a CI/CD pipeline to build, test, and release (publish) our code to our Azure Function App with every commit. We will use VSTS as our continuous delivery tool.

Before we configure the CI/CD pipeline, let us configure a staging deployment slot.

Deployment slots

As briefly mentioned before, deployment slots are an Azure PaaS feature which allows for a zero-downtime swap between your application environments. A deployment slot is, essentially, a replica of your production environment, which can be swapped with production by a DNS change handled by the Azure platform.

This feature is commonly used by developers to deploy production-ready code to a staging slot for final testing. If the staging deployment passes the tests, it can be promoted to production. Furthermore, if any issues are reported after deployment to production, the slots can be swapped back (since your former production...