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

In this chapter, we'll develop a mini-project by taking a very common use case that solves the business problem of sharing data across different applications using CSV. We'll use Durable Functions, which is an extension to Azure Functions that lets you write workflows by writing a minimal amount of code.

Here are the two core features of Durable Functions that we'll be using in the recipes of this chapter:

  • Orchestrator: An orchestrator is a function that is responsible for managing all activity triggers. It can be treated as a workflow manager that has multiple steps. The orchestrator is responsible for initiating the activity trigger, passing inputs to the activity trigger, getting the output, maintaining the state, and then passing the output of one activity trigger to another if required.
  • Activity trigger: Each activity trigger can be treated as a workflow step that performs a function.

    Note

    You can learn more about Durable Functions at https...