Book Image

Serverless computing in Azure with .NET

By : Rosenbaum
Book Image

Serverless computing in Azure with .NET

By: Rosenbaum

Overview of this book

Serverless architecture allows you to build and run applications and services without having to manage the infrastructure. Many companies have started adopting serverless architecture for their applications to save cost and improve scalability. This book will be your companion in designing Serverless architecture for your applications using the .NET runtime, with Microsoft Azure as the cloud service provider. You will begin by understanding the concepts of Serverless architecture, its advantages and disadvantages. You will then set up the Azure environment and build a basic application using a sample text sentiment evaluation function. From here, you will be shown how to run services in a Serverless environment. We will cover the integration with other Azure and 3rd party services such as Azure Service Bus, as well as configuring dependencies on NuGet libraries, among other topics. After this, you will learn about debugging and testing your Azure functions, and then automating deployment from source control. Securing your application and monitoring its health will follow from there, and then in the final part of the book, you will learn how to Design for High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Scale, as well as how to take advantage of the cloud pay-as-you-go model to design cost-effective services. We will finish off with explaining how azure functions scale up against AWS Lambda, Azure Web Jobs, and Azure Batch compare to other types of compute-on-demand services. Whether you’ve been working with Azure for a while, or you’re just getting started, by the end of the book you will have all the information you need to set up and deploy applications to the Azure Serverless Computing environment.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Logging events


In any application, logs are a very useful debugging and monitoring tool, however, they become even more crucial in serverless compute. As we will see in this chapter, it is not always easy to debug the functions locally, and it isn't always easy to simulate parallel execution of functions when they are triggered at scale. Given the asynchronous, cloud-based, and highly parallelized nature of the serverless code, the log statements become one of our most powerful tools for identifying and correcting errors.

Azure Function templates come preconfigured with the TraceWriter log parameter, which is based on the Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Script.Intercepting.TraceWriter class, implemented in the WebJobs SDK.

The usage of the TraceWriter class is not limited solely to functions and WebJobs. You can start leveraging the TraceWriter class in other parts of your application (such as Web UI) by installing the WebJobs NuGet package. This would allow you to log events consistently across multiple...