Serverless computing in Azure with .NET

By : Rosenbaum

4.3 (3)

Buy this Book

Serverless computing in Azure with .NET

4.3 (3)

By: Rosenbaum

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Serverless architecture allows you to build and run applications and services without having to manage the infrastructure. Many companies have started adopting serverless architecture for their applications to save cost and improve scalability. This book will be your companion in designing Serverless architecture for your applications using the .NET runtime, with Microsoft Azure as the cloud service provider. You will begin by understanding the concepts of Serverless architecture, its advantages and disadvantages. You will then set up the Azure environment and build a basic application using a sample text sentiment evaluation function. From here, you will be shown how to run services in a Serverless environment. We will cover the integration with other Azure and 3rd party services such as Azure Service Bus, as well as configuring dependencies on NuGet libraries, among other topics. After this, you will learn about debugging and testing your Azure functions, and then automating deployment from source control. Securing your application and monitoring its health will follow from there, and then in the final part of the book, you will learn how to Design for High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Scale, as well as how to take advantage of the cloud pay-as-you-go model to design cost-effective services. We will finish off with explaining how azure functions scale up against AWS Lambda, Azure Web Jobs, and Azure Batch compare to other types of compute-on-demand services. Whether you’ve been working with Azure for a while, or you’re just getting started, by the end of the book you will have all the information you need to set up and deploy applications to the Azure Serverless Computing environment.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Understanding Serverless Architecture

What is serverless?

Azure serverless

Architecture

Applications

Summary

Getting Started with the Azure Environment

Microsoft Azure Cloud

Azure serverless computing

Deploying a function

Clean up Azure resources

Summary

Setting Up the Development Environment

Configuring the development environment

Creating the function

Deploying the application to Azure

Storing the results

Setting up a web dashboard for scoring results

Summary

Configuring Endpoints, Triggers, Bindings, and Scheduling

Triggers and bindings

Endpoints

Blob Storage trigger

Timer trigger

Summary

Integrations and Dependencies

Processing a Twitter feed

Sharing code between functions

Integrating with a Service Bus queue

.NET dependency

Adding NuGet libraries

Summary

Integrating Azure Functions with Cognitive Services API

Using Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs to analyze text

The text sentiment analytics API call implementation

Storing the function results

Summary

Debugging Your Azure Functions

Software debugging

Logging events

Debugging the functions locally

Handling errors

Remote debugging in the cloud

Summary

Testing Your Azure Functions

The importance of testing

Software testing

Testing the functions

Performance testing

Summary

Configuring Continuous Delivery

Version Control System

Continuous Integration and delivery

Version control for functions

Continuous delivery for functions

Load testing with VSTS

Automating Function App deployment

Summary

Securing Your Application

Securing the application

Physical security

Host infrastructure

Networking security

Application-level security

Administrative access

Summary

Monitoring Your Application

Application performance management

Monitoring tools

Functions monitoring tools

Functions Monitor tab

Application Insights

Monitoring functions with Application Insights

Summary

Designing for High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and Scale

High Availability

Disaster Recovery

Scaling the application

Summary

Designing Cost-Effective Services

Pay for what you use

Azure Functions pricing

The overall application cost

Calculating the overall applications costs

Summary

C# Script-Based Functions

C# script-based functions

Using NuGet libraries

Sharing code between functions

Summary

Azure Compute On-Demand Options

Compute on-demand

Azure WebJobs

Azure Logic Apps

Azure Batch

Azure PaaS Cloud Services

Summary

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Storing the results

Now that we have a function generating a text sentiment score, we need to create a data store to hold the processing results. In this book, we will use a Microsoft SQL Server database as the datastore, as it is most commonly used in .Net application development.

We will deploy our SQL database in a PaaS SQL server in Azure. Using a PaaS service will allow us to deploy a database in the cloud, while the hosting server configuration, high availability, backup, and so on will be taken care of by the Azure platform.

Note that the Azure Functions serverless environment allows for integration with many more types of data stores, including NoSQL table storage, Cosmos DB, and other types of external databases, as well as triggering various APIs with function outputs.

Cosmos DB is a new globally-distributed Azure PaaS database, that supports multiple different models...