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

Understanding Azure Functions

Azure Functions is a part of the so-called serverless components that are available in the Azure cloud. Before you start learning about this service, you will have to understand what serverless really means. Initially, you might think that this concept implies no servers at all, but you will quickly reevaluate your way of thinking (as we are still quite far away from not using any kind of machine for our applications and workloads).

Being "serverless"

You can easily find many different articles describing the term "serverless"—to be honest, I would like to avoid promoting a single correct definition. That's because this topic is currently so fuzzy that it is hard to find the best description. However, my goal is to give you some hints and best practices that will enable you to understand this term in a way that makes the most sense to you.

Note that this chapter refers to serverless as a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS...