Book Image

Learning Azure Functions

Book Image

Learning Azure Functions

Overview of this book

Functions help you easily run small pieces of code in cloud with Azure functions without worrying about a whole application or the infrastructure to run it. With Azure functions, you can use triggers to execute your code and bindings to simplify the input and output of your code. This book will start with the basics of Azure Functions. You will learn the steps to set up the environment and the tools that we will be using in the further chapters. Once you have a better understanding of this, we will be creating our first hello world function app. Later you will be introduced to triggers, how they are used to activate a function, and how binding can be used to output results of a function.You will also explore the steps to create an assembly with complex functionality that can be used by functions. Next, this book will teach you to scale your functions and use them to process data, integrate systems, and build simple APIs and microservices. Finally, this book will cover some diagnostic techniques with Azure App services and best practices of working with Azure Functions. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the techniques of scaling your Azure functions and making the most of serverless architecture.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Introducing Microsoft Azure Services and Functions

"Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy."
- Norman Vincent Peale

This is an era of buzzwords. The moment we become familiar with one buzzword, another emerges and we start chasing it again. It started with cloud computing, DevOps, and now serverless computing.

This chapter introduces some of the fundamental concepts and terminology to give the reader a baseline understanding of cloud computing, cloud service models, and cloud deployment models. We will also understand what functions are and get acquainted with some of the related concepts of Microsoft Azure.

We will use a free trial of Azure Functions to get familiar with it. We will execute the sample function of printing Hello World! using Azure Functions.

The following are the topics that we will cover in this chapter:

  • An overview of serverless architectures
  • Why functions?
  • An overview of Microsoft Azure services
  • Azure App Services versus Azure Functions versus AWS Lambda