Deploy, Secure and Manage Azure Functions Surveying the Options

Sahil Malik: Hello and welcome to Deploy, Secure and Manage Azure Functions. My name is Sahil Malik. Let’s start with some introductions. This is me. I’m a consultant, author and trainer, author of about 20 plus books. Been an MVP for many years, spoken at numerous conferences and radios. That’s my Twitter handle and this is my website. Let’s stay in touch.

Now, this course is not about the basics of Azure Functions, but let’s start with some basic level setting about what we’re talking about. So what is Azure Functions? Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that lets you enable run code on-demand without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure. I have a lot of material where I talk about the basics of Azure Functions and encourage you to check that out as well.

So the idea of being there, any application in the world is basically something that accepts a trigger and produces an output. Our timer job, the trigger is time or scheduled service. A website or a web service accepts an HTTP trigger. You see, every application can be defined like this, but this application has to run somewhere, run somewhere being a virtual machine, container, cloud app. The whole tenet of Azure Functions is that you focus on your application, not where it runs, and this is the overall general theme of serverless computing.

Now again, I’ve talked about the basics of Azure Functions and other courses and other material. I encourage you to check those out first. What will we be talking about here? I’ll be talking about deploying Azure Functions, where I’ll talk about things like continuous deployment or zip deployment or the various other options that Azure Functions support. I’ll be talking about securing Azure Functions. What kind of authentication or security options do Azure Functions allow us to use? And finally we’ll talk about managing Azure Functions where I’ll talk about scaling and hosting Azure Functions. Let’s dive in.