Learning Azure Functions

Book excerpt: Embracing the cloud—a Serverless architecture to solve problems at scale About This Book Learn to develop, manage, deploy, and monitor Azure functions in any language. Make the most out of Azure functions to build scalable systems. A step-by-step guide that will help you eliminate the pain points of implementing a serverless architecture. Who This Book Is For This book aims at IT architects and developers who want to build scalable systems and deploy serverless applications with Azure functions. No prior knowledge of Azure functions is necessary. What You Will Learn Understand the folder structure of a function and the purposes of the files Deploy a function and test it Explore the common triggers that are used to activate a function Discover how bindings can be used to output the results of a function Build a dll that has functionality that can be leveraged by a function Chain functions to allow the invocation of one function from another Understand how to monitor the health of your functions In Detail 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. Style and Approach A step-by-side guide filled with real world examples that will guide you with the steps to build a scalable Cloud system