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

Storage


Storage can be used as input or output or both as a binding for the Azure Function.

For example, consider a scenario where the Azure Function takes images as input from the blob storage and creates a thumbnail of images and saves it again in the blob storage.

In this scenario, we need blob storage to be bound as input and output.

The following are the advantages of using storage as input binding with the Azure Function:

  • It allows us to take data from the storage and start processing
  • Whenever data is uploaded to the storage, a trigger gets fired and the Azure Function gets executed

The following are the advantages of using storage as output binding with the Azure Function:

  • It allows us to upload data to the storage after processing

Example

In this section, we will create an Azure Function with Blob storage trigger.

  1. Create the Azure Function with Blob storage trigger:
  1. Configure the storage path and connection, as shown in the following screenshot:
  1. Write the following code in the Azure Function...