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

Deploying Azure functions using ARM templates

So far, we have been manually provisioning Azure functions using the Azure portal. Although it's easy to work with the portal, this approach has a number of disadvantages:

  1. It is not easy to view the history of all the changes made to any service.
  2. In large projects with hundreds of services, replicating the infrastructure across new environments is not easy (in one of my engagements, we have more than 500 services). If customers ask to create a new environment (for instance, an Alpha environment), which should be similar to our production, then it might take weeks to create.

In order to resolve these challenges, it's a best practice to automate the process of infrastructure provisioning. Azure has a solution for this in the form of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.

ARM templates are JSON-based files where you can define the resources that you want to be created. You can add these ARM templates to source...