Exploring the world of Serverless with Azure Functions with Ben Chartrand

Imagine building a backend that is massively scalable, scales very quickly, is very cheap (free in a lot of cases) and completely abstracts away the details of infrastructure? Even better: what if you could use the language of your choice – C#, Node.js, Python, F# and more?

Serverless, alongside micro-services, are one of the hot trends in cloud and for darn good reason. It’s incredibly powerful but, as with any tool, requires you to understand how it works.

We’ll be discussing Microsoft’s take on serverless: Azure Functions! No prior knowledge is required.

We’ll start by discussing the basic concepts behind serverless and how things work under the hood. This is relatively generic/common amongst all the cloud computing providers.

I’ll show you how to build a function using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. There will be plenty of live coding, I’ll show you how to deploy, setup a CI/CD pipeline and more goodness. Note that I will be using a Windows box but you could also build functions on a Mac or Linux system.

To finish up we’ll discuss architecting of solutions. Before you rush off to replace that API, there are considerations to make i.e. how not to kill your database. I’ll show you some real-world examples I’ve built.

So come along for a fun evening learning about Azure Functions and Serverless! I promise there will be plenty of taco and wolf related analogies and examples.