Advanced Scenarios in Azure Functions Moving Beyond “Hello-World”

Sahil Malik: Welcome to Advanced Scenarios in Azure Functions. My name is Sahil Malik. Let’s start with some introductions. I’m a consultant, author and trainer, author of many books, M.V.P. for many years, spoken at numerous conferences and have numerous video trainings online. You can follow me on Twitter at @sahilmalik or on www.winsmarts.com. Let’s get started.

Azure Functions, what are Azure Functions? They are a serverless compute service that enable you to run code on-demand without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure. Let me explain what I mean by that. Whenever you write an application, any application is, well, some trigger and it produces some output, right? Any application. Well, what about a cron job? Well, that’s also a trigger. It’s a timer-based trigger. But the important thing is that this application, when you write this, something needs to run that application so you end up writing a virtual machine of a container or cloud app, so you have to worry about a lot of infrastructure around it. Azure Functions allow you to focus on your application, not where it runs. So you focus on your application and this whole tenet is called as serverless computing. Azure Functions is a key part of serverless computing.

In this course, I will be talking about numerous topics, starting with Durable Functions. Durable Functions is an extension of Azure Functions and Azure WebJobs. It is an exciting new capability that lets you write stateful functions in a serverless environment. The extension basically manages states, checkpoints and restarts for you, and really makes writing complicated scenarios a whole lot easier. We’ll look at that shortly. Next I’ll talk about writing functions in VSCode and how does VSCode allow you to write and debug Azure Functions. Note that when I talk about Durable Functions, I will also show you how to write Azure Functions in Visual Studio, Visual Studio proper, not the VSCode version. So it’s fair to say that we should spend some time looking at the VSCode development experience as well, and we’ll look at that. Then finally I will end up with various development features and tricks, things like Kudu, log streaming, process explorer, et cetera.