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

Blob Storage trigger


One of the prominent use cases for serverless computing is file processing. A function can be triggered upon file upload to a particular data store to do immediate manipulations on the data. This allows for asynchronous processing, and eliminates the need to be polling or traversing the data store in search of new data. In this manner, you can kick off a media encoding process, an image compression process, or, in our example, a text sentiment analysis on a text file after the user uploads a file.

To set up a function triggered by a file upload to the Azure Blob Storage, we will first need to create a storage account.

Creating a storage account for document upload

Let's create a storage account for document upload by performing the following steps:

  1. To create a Blob storage account, in the Azure portal, navigate to New (plus icon) -> Storage -> Storage Account as shown in the following screenshot:
  1. In the new blade, fill in the following required settings:
    • Name: Type...