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

Storing the results


Now that we have a function generating a text sentiment score, we need to create a data store to hold the processing results. In this book, we will use a Microsoft SQL Server database as the datastore, as it is most commonly used in .Net application development.

We will deploy our SQL database in a PaaS SQL server in Azure. Using a PaaS service will allow us to deploy a database in the cloud, while the hosting server configuration, high availability, backup, and so on will be taken care of by the Azure platform.

Note that the Azure Functions serverless environment allows for integration with many more types of data stores, including NoSQL table storage, Cosmos DB, and other types of external databases, as well as triggering various APIs with function outputs.

Cosmos DB is a new globally-distributed Azure PaaS database, that supports multiple different models such as document, tables, key-value, graph model and more. Cosmos DB integrates really well with Functions. To learn...