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

The Python Function App


Let's create a Python Function in Azure App. We already created Azure App in the previous chapter.

Python is still in the experimental phase, so we don't have much of an option as of now.

Now, we will create a Python Function and learn how to install and use third-party modules.

Example

We will create an HTTP request API which gives a weather report in JSON format in response. In this example, we will use Google Weather API, which is open source:

  1. Log into the Azure Portal and create Azure App. We have created Azure App in the previous chapter. Now we will create the function. Click on the + sign and select the language, as shown in the following screenshot:
  1. There are only two options available for us, that is HttpTrigger - Python and QueueTrigger - Python:
    • HttpTrigger - Python: This trigger gets fired whenever it receives an Http request
    • QueueTrigger - Python: This trigger gets fired when a message is added to specified Azure Queue storage
  2. Select HttpTrigger - Python. Now...