Microsoft Azure Developer: Create Serverless Functions

Course Overview
Hi everyone, my name is Mark Heath, and welcome to my course, Microsoft Azure Developer: Create Serverless Functions. I'm a. NET developer and cloud architect working at NICE Systems. Azure Functions is the quickest and easiest way to get your code running in Azure. It offers a serverless model where you don't need to worry about provisioning virtual machines in advance, and a per-second billing model that means you only pay while your code is actually running. And in this course, we're going to learn how Azure Functions allows you to rapidly develop custom code using your favorite programming language, and easily integrates through triggers and bindings with many other Azure services such as databases and message queues. We'll cover how you can develop functions in the Azure Portal, in Visual Studio, or using cross-platform tools like Visual Studio Code. We'll learn how you can easily create a REST API with HTTP triggered functions, as well as how to define scheduled tasks and respond to messages in queues. Then we'll see how we can not only test and debug locally, but easily get our code up and running in the cloud. And finally, we'll see how we can also host our functions in Docker containers. By the end of this course, you'll know how to develop, debug, and deploy your own Azure Function apps. We're going to be using Visual Studio Community Edition and C# most of the time in this course, but we'll also see how to use Visual Studio Code and JavaScript for a cross-platform development experience. So I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn about Azure Functions with the Microsoft Azure Developer: Create Serverless Functions course at Pluralsight.

Introducing Azure Functions
Hi, my name is Mark Heath, and welcome to this course, Microsoft Azure Developer: Create Serverless Functions. In this course, we're going to learn how Azure Functions enables us to rapidly build, test, and deploy our code in a serverless environment. Azure Functions has the capability to greatly speed up your development, dramatically reduce your costs, and allows you to automatically scale to meet high demand. It's a really powerful platform with many great capabilities, and so I'm really excited to be introducing you to it. And so let's start off by learning a bit more about what exactly Azure Functions is. Azure Functions is a Functions as a Service platform, and that means that it provides a platform for running individual functions, and a function is simply your code that runs in response to an event. Now Azure Functions supports several different programming languages, the most commonly used two being C# and JavaScript, but F# is also supported, and there are more languages that are available in various states of preview, such as Java and Python. And in this course, we're going to mainly be focusing on C#, although I will be showing you how you can create JavaScript functions as well.

Creating Functions in the Azure Portal
Hi, Mark Heath here, and in this module, we're going to learn how we can create Azure Functions in the Azure portal, and so in this module we're going to be spending most of our time in the portal. We'll start off by creating a new function app which will host our functions, and we'll be using the consumption pricing plan to take advantage of the serverless per-second billing model. Then we'll see how we can create a new function in the portal based on one of several built-in templates that enable you to get started quickly. Then we'll test our function from within the portal, and see how we can examine the invocation history for our function. And we'll also learn about the file structure of an Azure Function App including the role that the function. json file plays in defining a function. So let's get started.

Creating Functions in Visual Studio
Hi, Mark Heath here, and in this module, we'll learn how to create Azure Functions in Visual Studio 2017. Visual Studio 2017 is a really powerful development environment that supports creating Azure Function apps in C#, JavaScript or F#. It provides a rich editing experience with IntelliSense and the ability to debug your functions locally, and it's a great choice if your development environment is running on Windows. So, what do you need to install in order to use Visual Studio to develop Azure Function apps. Well, you do need to install Visual Studio 2017, and the free Community edition, which you can download here from the visualstudio. microsoft. com website, is perfectly capable of developing Function Apps. Now, when you install Visual Studio, make sure that the Azure development workload is selected, but don't worry if you've already installed it without the Azure development workload, you can easily use the installer to modify your installation afterwards. And this will give you some important tools that you need, including the Azure Storage Emulator, which locally emulates an Azure storage account, and the Azure Functions and Web Jobs Tools Visual Studio extension, which enables the local development and debugging experience. So if you'd like to follow along with the demos in this course, then why not get Visual Studio 2017 installed and updated to the latest version with the Azure development workload enabled, and then join me in the next demo where we'll create an Azure Function App in Visual Studio?

Creating Functions with Visual Studio Code
Hi, Mark Heath here, and in this module, we'll learn how we can use Visual Studio Code and the Azure Functions Core Tools to develop Azure Functions. Now, you might be wondering why we need another way of developing Azure Functions, after all, we've just seen how good Visual Studio 2017 is for developing and testing functions. However, Visual Studio 2017 does require Windows, and so if your development environment is Mac OS or Linux, then you'll need to use different tooling. Secondly, you may be aware of the Visual Studio Code Editor, which has exploded in popularity in recent years. It's completely free and open source, and cross-platform, so you can run it on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It's particularly popular with web developers, and it has a huge ecosystem of extensions that bring in support for all kinds of different programming languages, as well as integration with cloud providers like Azure. And so if you're wanting to develop Azure Functions on Mac OS or Linux, this is a great option, and, of course, if you're on Windows, but you just prefer the development experience of Visual Studio Code, then you can absolutely use this as well. So let's see what we need to get started.

Running Functions in Containers
Hi, Mark Heath here, and in this module, we're going to learn how to host our Azure Function App in a container. Now, so far in this course, we've seen that not only can we run our Function App in an App Service Plan in Azure, but we can also host the Azure Functions runtime locally, which is great for development. And we've also seen that version 2 of the Azure Functions runtime is cross-platform. And what this means is we can take the runtime and host it inside a Docker container as well, and Microsoft has already created some container images for us that do exactly that. So here on Docker Hub, we can see that Microsoft has provided an image called azure-functions-dotnet-core2. 0, and this image contains the version 2 Functions runtime and can be used to host functions written in. NET languages such as C# and F#. But there's also images available ready to run functions written in JavaScript, such as this azure-functions-node8 image, and there's one here for Python as well, azure-functions-python3. 6. So you can take one of these images as your starter image, we're going to be using the dotnet-core2. 0 image, add the contents of your Function App to it, and package that up into your own container, and I'll be showing you how to do that in this module.