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)

Best practices


The following are recommended best practices for using Azure Functions:

  • It is desirable to have stateless code to effectively utilize the serverless concept.
  • Keep functions short and simple. Create many short and simple functions rather than one big function.
  • Import dependencies only if they are required. Consider module dependencies as well.
  • Use storage queues, service bus queues, service bus topics, and event hubs for cross-functional communication.
  • Delete functions that you are no longer using, especially if the function is hosted on the App Service plan in the basic, standard, or premium tier.
  • Use the built-in monitoring of Function Apps to view and optimize request latencies or utilize Application Insights.