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

Testing an Azure function in a staging environment using deployment slots

In general, every application requires pre-production environments, such as staging and beta, in order to review functionalities prior to publishing them for end users. Although pre-production environments are great and help multiple stakeholders validate the application's functionality against the business requirements, there are a number of pain points associated with managing and maintaining them. These include the following:

  • We need to create and use a separate environment for our pre-production environments.
  • Once the application's functionality is reviewed in pre-production and the IT Ops team gets the go-ahead, there will be some downtime in the production environment while deploying the code based on the new functionalities.

All the preceding limitations can be covered by Azure Functions using a feature called slots (known as deployment slots in the App Service service). A...