Is Your Serverless Application Testable? – Azure Functions

22nd of July, 2017 / / 3 Comments

In this post, I’m going to introduce several design patterns when we write Azure Functions codes in C#, by considering full testabilities.

Sample codes used in this post can be found here.

User Story

  • As a DevOps engineer,
  • I want to search ARM templates using Azure Functions
  • So that I can browse the search result.

Basic Function Code

We assume that we have a basic structure that Azure Functions can use.… [Keep reading] “Is Your Serverless Application Testable? – Azure Functions”

Azure Functions Logging to Application Insights

20th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

We’re going to have a look at several ways to integrate Application Insights (AppInsights) with Azure Functions (Functions).
Functions supports built-in logging features using TraceWriter instance. Basic sample function might look like:

With TraceWriter, we can log information to the log console like:

However, it has the maximum limit of 1000 records. This is good for simple debugging purposes, but not for logging. Therefore, we should store logs somewhere like database or storage.… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions Logging to Application Insights”

Azure Functions with Swagger

13th of June, 2017 / / 4 Comments

Azure Functions Team has recently announced the Swagger support as a preview. If we use Azure Functions as APIs, this will be very useful. In this post, we will have a look how to enable Swagger support on Azure Functions.

Sample codes used for this post can be found here.

Sample Azure Functions Instance

First of all, with the sample code provided, we’re creating two HTTP triggers, CreateProduct and GetProduct. Once we deploy them, we can find it from the Azure Portal like:

Here are simple requests and responses through Postman:


Let’s create a Swagger definition document for those Functions.… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions with Swagger”

Message retry patterns in Azure Functions

22nd of May, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Azure Functions provide ServiceBus based trigger bindings that allow us to process messages dropped onto a SB queue or delivered to a SB subscription. In this post we’ll walk through creating an Azure Function using a ServiceBus trigger that implements a configurable message retry pattern.
Note: This post is not an introduction to Azure Functions nor an introduction to ServiceBus. For those not familiar will these Azure services take a look at the Azure Documentation Centre.… [Keep reading] “Message retry patterns in Azure Functions”

Precompiled Azure Functions Revisited

3rd of May, 2017 / / No Comments

Since Microsoft released a preview version of Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions in December, 2016, it’s been reported very buggy. Current roadmap says the tooling won’t be unveiled until .NET Standard 2.0 is released. Therefore, Azure App Service Team published an article to utilise ASP.NET Web Application projects in the meantime. Even though the approach requires a lot of hands for initial setup, this is literally the only way to play Azure Functions on Visual Studio without the tooling.… [Keep reading] “Precompiled Azure Functions Revisited”

Calling WCF client proxies in Azure Functions

17th of April, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Azure Functions allow developers to write discrete units of work and run these without having to deal with hosting or application infrastructure concerns. Azure Functions are Microsoft’s answer to server-less computing on the Azure Platform and together with Azure ServiceBus, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management (to name just a few) has become an essential part of the Azure iPaaS offering.

The problem

Integration solutions often require connecting legacy systems using deprecating protocols such as SOAP and WS-*.… [Keep reading] “Calling WCF client proxies in Azure Functions”

Integrating Microsoft Flow with Azure Functions for Non-IT People

27th of January, 2017 / / No Comments

Microsoft Flow (Flow) creates automated workflows between various apps and services so that users can get notifications, collect data and more. This is similar to Azure Logic Apps (Logic Apps), but has different target audiences such as marketing, sales or all other non-IT related people. This document provides high-level comparisons between Flow, Logic Apps and Azure Functions.
Flow contains comprehensive number of pre-defined workflows called templates so we can just simply choose one of them, provide necessary information and use it.… [Keep reading] “Integrating Microsoft Flow with Azure Functions for Non-IT People”

Testing Precompiled Azure Functions

20th of January, 2017 / / No Comments

Azure Functions has recently added a new feature that allows precompiled assembly to run functions. This gives us a great confidence with regards to unit testing. In this post, we are walking through how to unit test functions with ease, like which we do tests everyday.

The sample code used in this post can be found at HERE.

Function without Dependency

We’re not digging down precompiled function too much as it’s on the document.… [Keep reading] “Testing Precompiled Azure Functions”