Book Image

Learning Azure Functions

Book Image

Learning Azure Functions

Overview of this book

Functions help you easily run small pieces of code in cloud with Azure functions without worrying about a whole application or the infrastructure to run it. With Azure functions, you can use triggers to execute your code and bindings to simplify the input and output of your code. This book will start with the basics of Azure Functions. You will learn the steps to set up the environment and the tools that we will be using in the further chapters. Once you have a better understanding of this, we will be creating our first hello world function app. Later you will be introduced to triggers, how they are used to activate a function, and how binding can be used to output results of a function.You will also explore the steps to create an assembly with complex functionality that can be used by functions. Next, this book will teach you to scale your functions and use them to process data, integrate systems, and build simple APIs and microservices. Finally, this book will cover some diagnostic techniques with Azure App services and best practices of working with Azure Functions. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the techniques of scaling your Azure functions and making the most of serverless architecture.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Common types of triggers


Let's understand first how a trigger works and get acquainted with the different types of triggers available in Azure Functions.

The architecture of a trigger and how it works is shown in the following figure:

The preceding diagram shows the event that fires the trigger and once the trigger is fired, it runs the Azure Function associated with it.

We need to note a very important point here: one function must have exactly one trigger; in other words, one function can't have multiple triggers.

Now let's see the different types of trigger available in Azure:

  • TimerTrigger: This trigger is called on a predefined schedule. We can set the time for execution of the Azure Function using this trigger.
  • BlobTrigger: This trigger will get fired when a new or updated blob is detected. The blob contents are provided as input to the function.
  • EventHubTrigger: This trigger is used for the application instrumentation, the user experience, workflow processing, and in the Internet of Things...