Testing an Azure function in a staging environment using deployment slots

In general, every application requires pre-production environments, such as staging and beta, in order to review functionalities prior to publishing them for end users. Although pre-production environments are great and help multiple stakeholders validate the application's functionality against the business requirements, there are a number of pain points associated with managing and maintaining them. These include the following:

• We need to create and use a separate environment for our pre-production environments.
• Once the application's functionality is reviewed in pre-production and the IT Ops team gets the go-ahead, there will be some downtime in the production environment while deploying the code based on the new functionalities.

All the preceding limitations can be covered by Azure Functions using a feature called slots (known as deployment slots in the App Service service). A...