Book Image

Azure for Developers. - Second Edition

By : Kamil Mrzygłód
Book Image

Azure for Developers. - Second Edition

By: Kamil Mrzygłód

Overview of this book

Microsoft Azure is currently one of the fastest growing public cloud service providers thanks to its sophisticated set of services for building fault-tolerant and scalable cloud-based applications. This second edition of Azure for Developers will take you on a journey through the various PaaS services available in Azure, including Azure App Service, Azure Functions, and Azure SQL Databases, showing you how to build a complete and reliable system with ease. Throughout the book, you’ll discover ways to enhance your skills when building cloud-based solutions leveraging different SQL/NoSQL databases, serverless and messaging components, containerized solutions, and even search engines such as Azure Cognitive Search. That’s not all!! The book also covers more advanced scenarios such as scalability best practices, serving static content with Azure CDN, and distributing loads with Azure Traffic Manager, Azure Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door. By the end of this Azure book, you’ll be able to build modern applications on the Azure cloud using the most popular and promising technologies to make your solutions reliable, stable, and efficient.
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
1
Part 1: PaaS and Containers
8
Part 2: Serverless and Reactive Architecture
14
Part 3: Storage, Messaging, and Monitoring
22
Part 4: Performance, Scalability, and Maintainability

What is Durable Functions?

In most cases, the best idea for working with Azure Functions is to keep them stateless. This makes things much easier as you do not have to worry about sharing resources and storing state. However, there are cases where you would like to access it and distribute it between different instances of your functions. In such scenarios (such as orchestrating a workflow or scheduling a task to be done), a better option to start with would be to leverage the capabilities of Durable Functions, an extension to the main runtime, which changes the way you work somewhat.

The Durable Functions framework changes the way Azure Functions works as it lets you resume from where the execution was paused or stopped and introduces the possibility to take the output of one function and pass it as input. To get started, you don't need any extra extensions—the only thing you will need is the very same extension in Visual Studio Code that you used for standard...