Preface

Many businesses are rapidly adopting a microservices-first approach to development, driven by the availability of new commercial services like Azure Functions and AWS Lambda. In this book, we'll show you how to quickly get up and running with your own serverless development on Microsoft Azure. We start by working through a single function, and work towards integration with other Azure services like App Insights and Cosmos DB to handle common user requirements like analytics and highly performant distributed storage. We finish up by providing you with the context you need to get started on a larger project of your own choosing, leaving you equipped with everything you need to migrate to a cloud-first serverless solution.

After completing this book, you will be able to:

• Identify the key advantages and disadvantages of serverless development
• Build a fully-functioning serverless application and utilize a wide variety of Azure services
• Create, deploy and manage your own Azure Functions in the cloud
• Implement core design principles for writing effective serverless code

Who This Book Is For

This book is ideal for backend developers or engineers who want a quick hands-on introduction to developing serverless applications within the Microsoft ecosystem.

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Azure Functions, will walk you through the basic understanding of Azure Functions and then its serverless functionalities. In this chapter, we will learn to create, debug, and deploy the Azure Functions. Later in the chapter, we'll deal with serverless runtime functions of Microsoft's Azure Function.

Chapter 2, Deploying Azure Serverless, will help you to integrate your Azure Function with Cosmos DB, and with an Azure App Service. Later in the chapter, we'll use APIs to secure the Azure Functions and using Azure Application Insights we'll combine a complete logging and monitoring solution.

Chapter 3, Architecting Serverless Solutions, will be dealing with triggering functions with Cosmos DB and changing the functionality from an old .NET app to an Azure Function. We'll be developing a weather-dependent notification for our personal finance app. Later in the chapter, we'll analyze how to integrate old applications using serverless architecture.

To Get the Most out of This Book

You should have a basic knowledge of C# and a general knowledge of Azure. Knowledge of ASP.NET/MVC is beneficial but is not mandatory. The minimum hardware requirements are: Intel Core i3 or equivalent, 4GB RAM, 10 GB hard disk, and a stable internet connection. You'll also need the following software installed in advance:

• Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox (Latest updates installed)
• Postman app for API Development Environment
• Visual Studio 2017 with Azure Development Workflow (Latest version)
• Node.js with Azure-functions-core-tools version 1.x installed via npm
• .NET Framework 4.6 or higher

Download the Example Code Files

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The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/TrainingByPackt/Beginning-Serverless-Architectures-with-Microsoft-Azure. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions Used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "The example is called BeginningAzureServerlessArchitecture, so all code snippets will refer to that namespace."

A block of code is set as follows:

{
  Amount: 47.32,
  ExecutionTime: "2018-01-01T09:00:00Z"
} 

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

class Transaction
  {
    public DateTime ExecutionTime { get; set; }
    public Decimal Amount { get; set; }
  }

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Right-click on your project and select Publish. Select Create New Azure Function App."

Activity: These are scenario-based activities that will let you practically apply what you've learned over the course of a complete section. They are typically in the context of a real-world problem or situation.

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

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