Showing all posts tagged: 'Serverless'

A 19-post collection

TechDays Netherlands 2017

In October 2017 I got the privilege to speak at my first Microsoft-organised conference in the Netherlands. It was 2 days (well, 3 days if you count travelling) of packed talks, meetings, interesting conversations and general geeking out. I've spoken about why you should attend these kind of events either as a speaker or attendee many times and this event definitely proved me right. Apart from the awesome talks that I had the chance to attend, I met with many Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers from around the world and got the chance to learn from them and expand my network …[read more]

Azure Functions, Node.js and Environment Variables

Another fun project (yes another one) using 2 of my favourite frameworks: serverless with [Azure Functions](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-reference-node" target="_blank) and Node.js. I'm developing locally using the [Azure Functions Core Tools](https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure-functions-core-tools" target="_blank) (former CLI) and [Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/" target="_blank). It's a match made in heaven as I get to be super productive using the CLI and at the same time feel like a proper developer debugging issues in VS Code. I can attest that I …[read more]

DDD South West Retrospect

This is going to be a short post since I only managed to experience only part of the overall conference. Life and work commitments meant that I had to fly to Bristol later in the day, missing out on the speakers dinner. The dinner is way more than just food. In fact, I've noticed that I rarely pay any attention to the, otherwise tasty, food. That's because the speaker's dinner is an excellent opportunity to meet up with new speakers and catch up with old friends. These dinners also tend to run late in the night with the conversation moved …[read more]

Monitor Azure Web Application backups with Azure Functions

For most of your monitoring and alerting needs, [Azure Monitor](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/monitoring-and-diagnostics/monitoring-overview" target="_blank) should be the tool of choice. It's made the whole process so much easier and streamlined while, for the first time, providing management through the portal. I've already blogged about various monitoring options [here](GHOST_URL/monitoring-applications-and-infrastructure-on-azure/" target="_blank). However, there are a still few edge cases (not for long) for which Azure Monitor can't be the solution. In this instance, I needed a way to monitor and alert on failed backups on Azure Web Apps …[read more]

Azure Functions improvements with WebPack

[Azure Functions](GHOST_URL/devops-with-azure-functions-a-holistic-approach/" target="_blank) are great for creating solutions built on top of serverless architecture. In the past I've talked about the various deployment options but today I want to focus on performance improvements. The team recently introduced pre-compiled Functions which, in my mind, is a fantastic enhancement. Because it promotes good design by allowing you to decouple your implementation from the Function call itself and make your code a lot more testable. Some may digress because this may also cause Function code to explode in size. My answer to this is that you need …[read more]

Serverless Architecture with Azure

Last week I published an article on Serverless architecture on Azure. The post can be found on the Simple Talk website and I was honoured to be invited to have my piece published. You can read all about it here: https://www.simple-talk.com/cloud/cloud-development/serverless-architecture-azure/ Feel free to leave a comment here or at Simple Talk. …[read more]

Deploying Functions with ARM templates and inline code

Last week I started a mini-series that focused on [Azure Functions and DevOps. The tooling is still being worked and in the interim we need a solution in order to do proper CI/CD with Azure Functions. In this post we're looking into how to deploy Azure Functions using ARM Templates only. That's correct. This is a one stop solution but requires that you include your function code inline to the ARM JSON template. This is somewhat undocumented and I had to figure out how do it with help from the Azure PG (product group). The good parts Obviously this …[read more]

Azure Functions custom logging with AppInsights

You can tell I'm working on [Azure Functions](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/" target="_blank) from the frequency of posts. This one focuses on logging. Functions by default generate plenty of logs which you can view in the portal or download using the [Kudu REST API](https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/REST-API" target="_blank). This is great and it comes out of the box without you having to configure a single thing. However, what if you have some custom, complex logic that you want to capture and log. And I guess that in …[read more]