Rami Vemula - Integrating Serverless Architecture: Using Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, and SignalR Service

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-4488-3 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

The current decade of modern technology is not just encouraging businesses to undergo a technology shift, but is also providing innovative architectural solutions to serve their customers in a better way. The strategies like cloud first, mobile first from software giants like Microsoft are very promising. They provide new cloud architectures with greatest computational power at affordable prices. Gone are the days when developers needed to write thousands of lines of code to automate business workflows; the new cloud services provide numerous easy options to create and maintain business orchestrations. This opened doors for a whole new era of customer focused innovation and automation.

In the recent past, serverless computing gained significant momentum because of its built-in capabilities to abstract infrastructure and provide highly scalable solutions. Microsoft started its journey of serverless computing through Azure Functions. The streamlined development experience, event-driven approach, and ability to integrate with other solutions made the Azure Functions a favorite for projects where the Rapid Application Development model is followed. The overall ease of maintaining Azure Functions made them unique in serverless architectures.

Integrating Serverless Architecture Using Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, and SignalR Service provides a holistic approach to design and development of a Twitter Bot application by leveraging Azure Functions. The different types of Azure Functions narrated in this book will empower you to make the right decisions while adopting Azure Functions to specific business requirements. Azures Cosmos DB is used as the backend for the Twitter Bot application. This book illustrates the basic concepts of Cosmos DB along with its change feed mechanism through multiple examples. ASP.Net Core is the latest open source web framework from Microsoft and is used in this book to build the Twitter Bot web application.

Chapter , we create a timer trigger-based Azure Function and integrate it with the custom dependency injection implementation. We also learn how to debug and publish an Azure Function from Visual Studio to the Azure environment.

In Chapter , we create a Cosmos DB trigger-based Azure Function and integrate the repository pattern with existing functions.

In Chapter to secure all the application secrets. In that same chapter, we learn how to implement logging and exception handling in Azure Functions.

Chapter details the security aspects of Azure Functions, where we integrate security flow from the Twitter Bot web app to Azure Functions using an authentication token.

Concepts related to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) are discussed in Chapter . We create build and release definitions at Azure DevOps for the Twitter Bot application source code and automate the entire DevOps lifecycle.

As a last note, I encourage you to further explore Azure Function concepts like durable functions, function proxies, etc. As the digital world is transforming itself into microservices to serve a global audience, there is a need for technologies to collaborate and deliver high-performance, scalable solutions. Understanding and implementing the right technologies to enrich a business solution and building eminence around current-day technologies are the most common problems faced by software professionals and organizations in our fast-paced modern-day ecosystem. This book demonstrates an end-to-end application design through one of the latest serverless architecture paradigms and, in the process, attempts to build eminence around some of the latest technologies.

Lets get started

I would first like to thank my parentsRamanaiah and RajaKumarimy wife Sneha, my three year old daughter Akshaya, and the rest of my familymy in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins, and kidsfor their valuable support. Without that support, I could not have achieved all the wonderful milestones and accomplishments in my life. Their consistent encouragement, patience, and guidance gave me the strength to overcome all the hurdles and kept me moving forward.