Azure web functions little bites of services
- 1. AZURE WEB FUNCTIONS LITTLE BITES OF SERVICES
- 2. WHO AM I AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? • Aaron Petry • Principle Consultant for Improving • 20+ years of development experience • Over 15 in the .Net stack • I’ve been using Azure Web Functions for 2 years • [email protected]
- 3. DISCLAIMER • Microsoft has around 140,000 people. • They’ve invested heavily in Azure overall, and have at least hundreds working only on Azure. • There is a team devoted specifically to Azure Web Functions. • About a month before this presentation, they released a whole new feature-set, including IOC. I will touch on that briefly, but it’s necessarily not something I’ve had time to dive deeply into. • Your mileage may vary, consult local conditions, all terms warnings apply.
- 4. WHAT ARE AZURE WEB FUNCTIONS? WHAT IS “SERVERLESS” FOR THAT MATTER?
- 5. WHAT ARE AZURE WEB FUNCTIONS? “Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that enables you to run code on- demand without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure.” – Microsoft Azure Functions Documentation
- 6. WAIT! I CAME HERE TO LEARN ABOUT SERVERLESS FUNCTIONS! • First, what do you mean by serverlerss? What is serverless? • The worst description of anything in computing. Maybe. • “Serverless” really means platform as a service. • Azure web functions are not “serverless.” They are Function as a Service. • “Serverless” really means you run your application without managing infrastructure. • If you’re going through https://portal.azure.com, you’re already “serverless!”
- 7. A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMPUTER APPLICATION DESIGN • The server on site. • The Virtual Machine. • The hosted application. • The Cloud! • Everything As A Service!
- 8. WAIT! SO IS ALL OF THIS JUST A MARKETING TRICK!? •No. The names are marketing. •The advantages are real. •Money just means that something is more likely to survive.
- 9. SO, ARE YOU FINALLY GOING TO ANSWER THE QUESTION? • What are Azure Web Functions? Right. • Function as a Service is a way of providing discrete computing actions triggered in response to events or HTTP requests without managing infrastructure. • If you’ve ever used IFTTT, then you get the idea already.
- 10. WHY WOULD ANYONE USE AZURE WEB FUNCTIONS?
- 11. USE A WEB FUNCTION IN RESPONSE TO… Queues Graph API Blob storage Timed events Service bus HTTP Requests
- 12. AND GET INFORMATION FROM… Blob storage Cosmos DB Microsoft Graph SignalR Table storage Mobile Apps* *Only for Azure Web Functions version 1.1
- 13. AND OUTPUT TO… Blob storage Cosmos DB Event Hubs HTTP/Web hooks Graph API Queue Storage
- 14. OR OUTPUT TO… Notification Hub* Mobile Apps* Send Grid Service Bus SignalR Table Storage Twilio *Only for Azure Web Functions version 1.x
- 15. WAIT A MINUTE!!!
- 16. MAYBE SOME EXAMPLES? • Suppose you want to watch a message queue, look up contact information based on the object added, and send a reminder when a message is added to the queue. Watch a Queue Blob storage Twilio
- 17. OR… • Maybe you want to have a system to see who’s logged into the office and available? You can watch GraphAPI events for the log-in and log-out, and then update a dashboard. Graph API SignalR
- 18. THE CLASSIC HELLO WORLD EXAMPLE
- 19. BUT NONE OF THAT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO? • Bindings are the easiest thing to do, and you will need some sort of input binding. • If you need to read from something not listed, you can. • If you need to have some action taken that isn’t obvious from the list of output bindings, that’s possible too.
- 20. SO HOW DO YOU DEVELOP AZURE WEB FUNCTIONS?
- 21. YOU CAN DEVELOP AND TEST LOCALLY! • Even though they’ve got “Azure” and “Web” in the name, you can develop and test your functions locally. • Use the Dev tool you want: • Visual Stuido? Of course. • Maven? Apparently yes, but I won’t cover it. • VS Code? Yep. • Anything you want via the command line? You got it.
- 22. VISUAL STUDIO • Works for Web Functions written in C#. • Makes a .dll that gets uploaded to Azure. • Probably the easiest way to do this. • You can also use other DevOps deployment tools.
- 23. HERE’S HOW TO START • Make a new project and select Azure Function. • Set up your local storage emulation. • Pick whatever trigger you want to use.
- 25. GREAT. DO I NEED A NEW PROJECT FOR EVERY FUNCTION? • One public function per class, but you can have more functions in your project. • To add another function is very easy. • Right click the project, pick “Add Azure Function” and choose your trigger. • Connection strings and the like get saved in the Environment Variables for your function.
- 27. I WANT TO DO OUTPUT BINDING
- 28. HOW DOES THE BINDING KNOW WHAT IT’S WRITING TO? • This is the function.json file that is created for that other function. • Edit it at the Azure portal. • Or edit locally. • This is what Azure reads to understand how to use your function.
- 29. SO WHAT DIDN’T I COVER? • IOC in Azure Web Functions • Dynamic/Runtime bindings (IBinder and BlobAttribute) • Using Entity Framework in your function • The difference between 1.x and 2.x • Security
- 30. USEFUL REFERENCES FOR YOU • In making this presentation I referenced a number of sources of information: • https://jhaleyfiles2016.blob.core.windows.net/public/Azure%20WebJobs%20SDK%20 Cheat%20Sheet%202014.pdf • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/
- 31. QUESTIONS?