Book Image

Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Praveen Kumar Sreeram
Book Image

Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Praveen Kumar Sreeram

Overview of this book

This third edition of Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook guides you through the development of a basic back-end web API that performs simple operations, helping you understand how to persist data in Azure Storage services. You'll cover the integration of Azure Functions with other cloud services, such as notifications (SendGrid and Twilio), Cognitive Services (computer vision), and Logic Apps, to build simple workflow-based applications. With the help of this book, you'll be able to leverage Visual Studio tools to develop, build, test, and deploy Azure functions quickly. It also covers a variety of tools and methods for testing the functionality of Azure functions locally in the developer's workstation and in the cloud environment. Once you're familiar with the core features, you'll explore advanced concepts such as durable functions, starting with a "hello world" example, and learn about the scalable bulk upload use case, which uses durable function patterns, function chaining, and fan-out/fan-in. By the end of this Azure book, you'll have gained the knowledge and practical experience needed to be able to create and deploy Azure applications on serverless architectures efficiently.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Avoiding cold starts by warming the app at regular intervals

By now, you might be aware of the fact that you can create Azure functions in the following three hosting plans:

  • App Service plan
  • Consumption plan
  • Premium plan

One of the benefits of being serverless is the fact that you are charged based on the number of executions. This benefit is available only when you create the function app using the Consumption plan. However, one of the concerns that developers report about using the Consumption plan is something called cold starting, which refers to spinning up an Azure function to serve requests when there have been no requests for quite some time. To learn more about this topic, go to azure.microsoft.com/blog/understanding-serverless-cold-start/?ref=msdn.

Note

The Premium plan and App Service plan have a dedicated instance reserved for us and they can always be warm even if there are no requests for quite a while. Having a dedicated instance always running...