The Azure Functions team has yet again joined us for another monthly live webcast after a short interval.
In this live webcast, along with Jeff Hollan, Skyler and Stefanus joined us to give a picture of the latest happenings in Azure Functions space.
Without any further delay, let us jump in as there are tons of update are awaiting.
What’s new?
- PowerShell 7 – it is now generally available. PowerShell 6 is nearing its end and hence users are recommended to adapt to the latest version
- PowerShell Durable Functions – It opens up some automation scenario
- Java 11
- Per-app scale limits for all plans – It is one of the most requested features and certainly it is useful for throttling and downstream systems.
- OpenID support for authentication
- .NET
-> IFunctionsConfigurationBuilder
-> ReadyToRun
-> V2 platform upgrade - Headless chromium support in Linux consumption (Puppeteer/ Playwright)
- Extension bundles v2
-> Durable Functions v2, Service Bus v4, Event Hubs v4, Storage v4 - Durable Functions monitoring in the portal
- “Custom Handler” section in host.json (Usability improvements)
- Dapr extension (triggers and bindings)
Community Highlights
- Community Discord Server – http://aka.ms/functions/discord
- Mikhail Shilkov – Azure Serverless and Pulumi Workshop
- Anjana Fernando – Introduction to Azure Functions in Ballerina
- Yingying Fu – Integrate card payment with stripe and functions
What’s coming?
- Restrict storage to VNet – It is now of the most requested features which allow you to put your storage behind your VNet
- Checkpoint controls for Event Hubs and Cosmos DB
- KeyVault setting secret rotation
- Scaffold functions from Swagger / Open API definition
Why should I choose Azure Functions over a different service?
- Cost – You want to pay only for what you use
- Speed – Speed of development is massive
- Scale (easily) – Management of any infrastructure is too much management for you
Announcements
- Shifting Express.JS app to Azure Functions – A new documentation is coming up!
- Project Stencils (Coming up!)
Serverless API use cases
Some of the things that team has seen recently;
- Asynchronous message processing and storing data in a database
- Decoupling input/output for application hosted on service such as Azure App service
- Real-time processing of stateful transactions
Customer Stories
You can also read some of the successful customer stories from the below customers in Microsoft official page
- Quest Software
- PwC AI
Project stencil
Which way do you go when creating Serverless APIs?
- Designing a new API from scratch inside API Management
- Existing APIM API to Functions
Skyler showed an awesome demo how to deploy Functions in code first approach and also, he showed to deploy Functions to API Management in design first approach.
Serverless September
Virtual event with focus on Serverless web and APIs. Community submissions open.
Serverless September is once in a year opportunity to keep talking about Serverless to our friends without feeling bad about it. To make things more exciting, we get the entire month of September, for 30 days, to tell the community how we are using Serverless.
Question and Answer
- Why can’t we build and publish an Azure Function using python in a visual studio?
You can still use VS as a Python code editor, but the majority of the team prioritization goes into VS Code. - What of integration test harnesses for C# functions in dotnet? You wrote a functions-test-helper library in GitHub which had the basics, it worked great, but any official support coming?
The team talks about it a lot but doesn’t prioritize it and you may not expect this calendar year. - Can’t we do the scrapping by adding beautiful soup or scrappy packages in the Azure Function? A lot of sites use client-side frameworks like react, vue, web assembly, etc, so having an actual browser to do the scraping is super helpful.
