Book Image

Learning Azure Functions

By : Manisha Yadav, Mitesh Soni
Book Image

Learning Azure Functions

By: Manisha Yadav, Mitesh Soni

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)

Using storage


We have created an API and a user form, which uses Azure Cosmos DB to store user data.

Cosmos DB is a database service that is globally distributed. It allows us to manage our data even if we keep it in datacenters that are scattered throughout the world. It provides the tools we need to scale both global distribution patterns and computational resources, and these tools are provided by Microsoft Azure.

Here are some of the advantages:

  • It can support multiple data models using one backend. This means that it can be used for document, key value, relational, and graph models.
  • It is more or less a NoSQL database because it does not rely on any schemas.
  • It uses a query language similar to SQL and can easily support ACID transactions; some people classify it as a NewSQL type of database.