Showing all posts tagged: 'Serverless'

A 19-post collection

Serverless Text Moderation with Azure Functions and the Azure Cognitive Services

I love how Microsoft and Azure is making developers' lives so much easier. Consider the title of this blog post. Now try to think how you would solve this problem 2 or 3 years ago. How much code, infrastructure and data would have to be produced in order to generate a text moderation service that scales, performs and works reliably every single time! Fast forward to today and solving the exact same problem takes no less than 100 lines of code by using the tools that MS has made available to our disposal. The heavy lifting is done by the …[read more]

Using HTTPS with Azure Functions in local development

It's usually the small things that make a big difference. As I was updating my Function Core tools today (the Functions CLI) I was pleasantly surprised to notice some new functionality which was added to the tooling. The Functions team has added the capability to enforce/use HTTPS when developing and debugging in the local development using the Functions Core tools. If you're new to Azure Functions and never used the Core tools, then you may be surprised to find that we now have 2 versions of the tools. I know, but stay with me because they currently server different …[read more]

Using Azure Serverless to copy data from Service Bus to Azure Data Lake

Microsoft's serverless is continually improving with better stability and features. The out-of-the-box integration with many services makes serverless an appealing approach when it comes to solving a problem. I was recently asked by a customer to implement a solution that copies json data posted to a Service Bus Topic into an Azure DataLake in order to run offline analytics and reporting. At this point, I would have suggested using Azure EventGrid instead of Service Bus, since the solution needs to support multiple subscribers and it's a lot more lightweight. However, Service Bus Topics can also accommodate multiple subscribers and, besides, …[read more]

Keeping your Azure Search Index up-to-date with Azure Functions

Azure Search can work really well with Azure Blob Storage. It can automatically index and analyse documents uploaded to a Storage Container to make it easy for you to expose the data in your application. When working with Blob data, Azure Search is designed to incrementally add new documents automatically. However, where it gets really tricky is when blobs are deleted from storage. The index doesn't get updated automatically, so the data ends up in a stale state. There's a way to use a soft delete approach to indicate to an Azure Search data source that a document/blob should …[read more]

Debugging C# (.NET Core) Azure Functions with VS Code

The [v2 release](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2017/09/25/develop-azure-functions-on-any-platform/" target="_) of the Azure Function Core tools (i.e. the CLI) has been out for a while now. It may still be in preview while the team is finalizing the stability and performance of the tool, but it's really exciting because we now have a cross-platform tool based on .NET Core. You can download the latest Function Core tools from npm using the following command: npm i -g azure-functions-core-tools@core With the latest release of the Core tool you can develop, debug and run Azure …[read more]

Running Azure Functions anywhere with the power of containers

I work with Azure Functions a lot. I also work a lot with Docker, Windows Containers, and microservices in general. For some time I have been talking about these subjects either to customers or at conferences trying to explain how they can be used to fulfill different tasks and meet different project requirements. Azure Functions are the swiss army knife of developers and IT/Ops teams because they can solve so many problems with minimal code, maintenance overhead and infrastructure abstractions around scalability and reliability. Up until now, if someone needed to create a run an Azure Function there were …[read more]

Enforcing HTTPS-only traffic and HSTS settings for Azure Web Apps and Azure Functions

I hope that by now your site is running under HTTPS. If not, you may want to read Troy Hunt's [blog post(s)](https://www.troyhunt.com/ssl-is-not-about-encryption/" target="_blank ) on the subject. He does a great job explaining the WHY. If your site's running on Azure Web Apps under the default naming convention <yoursitename>.azurewebsites.net, you have the option to enforce HTTPS using the Azure certificate. However, this is not recommended. Most likely, you'll have your site running under a custom domain. If that's the case, you'll need a custom certificate. There are many …[read more]