Book Image

Advanced Serverless Architectures with Microsoft Azure

By : Daniel Bass
Book Image

Advanced Serverless Architectures with Microsoft Azure

By: Daniel Bass

Overview of this book

Advanced Serverless Architectures with Microsoft Azure redefines your experience of designing serverless systems. It shows you how to tackle challenges of varying levels, not just the straightforward ones. You'll be learning how to deliver features quickly by building systems, which retain the scalability and benefits of serverless. You'll begin your journey by learning how to build a simple, completely serverless application. Then, you'll build a highly scalable solution using a queue, load messages onto the queue, and read them asynchronously. To boost your knowledge further, the book also features durable functions and ways to use them to solve errors in a complex system. You'll then learn about security by building a security solution from serverless components. Next, you’ll gain an understanding of observability and ways to leverage application insights to bring you performance benefits. As you approach the concluding chapters, you’ll explore chaos engineering and the benefits of resilience, by actively switching off a few of the functions within a complex system, submitting a request, and observing the resulting behavior. By the end of this book, you will have developed the skills you need to build and maintain increasingly complex systems that match evolving platform requirements.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Structured Logging with Azure Application Insights


It is completely possible to build your own logging system, and even quite straightforward to build a simple one. All you need is a service that can accept high volumes of data and a time series database. The trouble is that it's simple to create the basics, but maintaining an incredibly high uptime, adding sophisticated features, and making the system user friendly is very challenging. As always in a serverless architecture, it's better to rent one that someone else has built for you.

There is a plethora of logging services in existence, including DataDog and Humio. All have their particular feature sets, but as usual with a serverless architecture, we are only interested in paying for what we use and having unlimited scale. Hence, we will focus on Application Insights, which is built into Azure, has a built-in connection to Azure Functions and many other Azure services, and is charged per quantity of data ingestion. It's also got great...