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

Introduction

When developing modern applications that need to be hosted in the cloud, we need to make sure that the applications are stateless. Statelessness is an essential factor in developing cloud-aware applications. For example, we should avoid persisting any data in a resource that is specific to any virtual machine (VM) instance provisioned to any Azure service (for example, App Service, the API, and so on). Otherwise, we won't be able to leverage some services, such as autoscaling functionality, as the provisioning of instances is dynamic. If we depend on any VM-specific resources, we'll end up facing problems with unexpected behaviors.

Having said that, the downside of the previously mentioned approach is ending up working on identifying ways of persisting data in different mediums, depending on the application architecture.

Although the overall intention of this book is to have each recipe of every chapter solve at least one business problem, the recipes in...