The Azure Functions team has yet again joined us for another monthly live webcast by staying remote and safe.
In this live webcast, along with Jeff Hollan, Anthony and Matthew 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?
- Static web apps – The Static Web App service offers a single service within Azure that’s specifically built for hosting static file-based web applications. It also includes the ability to deploy RESTful APIs using Azure Functions code to the same Static Web App service that’s hosting the web application.
- Durable Functions Distributed tracing – alpha – If you are Durable Functions user, you no longer need to worry about getting end to end visibility on your different function calls with this feature enabled.
- Performance improvements
Community highlights
- Community Discord Server – http://aka.ms/functions/discord
- Travis Roberts – Auto Start and Stop Session Hosts in Windows Virtual Desktop Spring Update (ARM) with Azure Function
- Saleh Alshami – Writing & Publishing Azure Functions in Swift (Custom Handler Edition)
- René Bremer – How to create a Selenium web scraper in Azure Functions
- Cassie Breviu – ONNX: No, it’s not a Pokemon! Deploy your ONNX model with C# and Azure Functions
Functions Survey winners
What’s coming?
- IConfiguration for .Net
- Checkpoint control for Event Hubs/Cosmos DB
- Durable Functions for Python
- Durable Functions for PowerShell
- OpenID connect integration with App service Authentication (EasyAuth)
- Java 11 and PowerShell 7
- Key Vault setting secret rotation
- Dapr extension
Custom Handlers
Custom Handler is a feature in Azure Functions which lets you bring your own command, script, or executable, and hook it up to Azure Functions Triggers and Bindings.
- Main language extensibility mechanism in Functions
- Use any language that can run an HTTP Server process
- Supports all Triggers and Bindings
- Enables the community to contribute language workers
The trigger or input payload would invoke the function app’s host which would pass the request to the Custom Handler as an HTTP request and get back the response to the function again. If you have an output binding in the function, then the function host takes it to the target. All the permitted Triggers and Bindings can be used in these scenarios. Also, Anthony showed a quick demo on it.
If you would like to learn more about the Custom handlers, here is a blog covering the process from the ground up.
Custom Handlers – Roadmap
- Best support for building language workers
- Easier to run web apps
- Tooling support
Azure Functions sessions on Microsoft Build
If you have had not seen the interesting sessions from Build, here are a few sessions you got to check out regarding Azure Functions.
Question and Answer session
- Any news regarding support for managed identity in Azure Functions?
The conversation is going around and the team has some general plans on that. - Is Application Insights the only way to view Azure Functions logs now?
It is not only the source, but you can also leverage Log Analytics and Data Explorer on top of it to investigate. - Any plans on Azure Function proxies?
No plans as of now. The team is focusing much on making a strong relationship between API Management and Azure Function for such kind of scenarios. - Can we do hybrid SSR for Angular projects with Azure Functions?
It should be highly likely possible. - Timer triggered function is in the dedicated app service plan and not premium or consumption, is there any reason that we don’t set always on Cron by default?
That was a good suggestion and can be picked for creative scenarios. - Why Output bindings for MongoDB in Cosmos DB alone rather than in core SQL?
The Cosmos DB team is looking in that front and the scenario is being examined.
