Cloud & Engineering

We regularly write about our technical experiences (good and bad) and what we're learning from the market.

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Is It Time to Migrate to Isolated Azure Functions?

Posted by Emile Dawalibi on 23 November 2022

App Service Isolated, App Services, Azure, Azure Functions, Service Bus, ASP.NET Core, APIs, .NET, Isolated Azure Functions

Introduction

On November 10, 2020, Microsoft released .NET 5. But at that point in time, the current version of the Azure Functions runtime host (version 3.x) couldn’t support any code targeting .NET 5. That’s because version 3 of the runtime utilises NET Core 3.1, and therefore all the functions you code had to...

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Effectively deploying a network-locked Function App – Part 3: App Service Environment v3

Posted by Abhinav Sharma on 21 October 2022

App Service Environment, Azure Functions, Microsoft Azure, cloud infrastructure

Overview

In the previous posts, I talked about different scenarios of deploying a Function App with a Consumption Plan and an App Service Plan in a network-locked architecture. In this post, I will cover a different architectural solution using App Service Environment v3. I will go through the complete deployment...

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Effectively deploying a network-locked Function App – Part 2: App Service Plan

Posted by Abhinav Sharma on 13 October 2022

Azure Functions, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Networking, cloud infrastructure

Overview

In the previous post, I talked about how a Function App deployed in Consumption Plan cannot be deployed in a network-locked architecture. In this post, I will try to reach the same objective of deploying a Function App where all the components used by the app are not accessible from the public internet...

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Effectively deploying a network-locked Function App – Part 1: Consumption Plan

Posted by Abhinav Sharma on 07 October 2022

App Services, Azure Functions, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Networking

Overview

Azure Function is a serverless service offering on Azure that allows one to write less code, maintain less infrastructure, and focus on writing code to solve the problem at hand. The deployment of Azure Function is usually not too complicated, but it tends to get harder to manage when deployed with various...

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Logic Apps Standard vs Durable Functions: How to Choose? (2021 Update)

Posted by Paco de la Cruz on 09 November 2021

Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Azure Durable Functions, Microsoft Azure

Introduction

Three years ago, after the release of Azure Durable Functions, I wrote a post comparing the capabilities of Logic Apps and Durable Functions. Both service offerings provide orchestration capabilities on Azure. At that time, Azure Durable Functions had just been released as generally available. As you’d...

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Part 3: Azure Functions on Kubernetes - have your cake and eat it too

Posted by Aaron Newton on 22 June 2021

Azure Functions, Cloud Strategy, Microservices, Serverless, kubernetes, serverless hosting

Introduction

If you’ve read the first two posts in this series, welcome back. So far in our story, our heroes – microservices and serverless functions – save us from a monolithic meltdown. Go have a read if you’d like to laugh, cringe, and learn from my adventures.

This final post covers a different project. We had...

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Part 2: Command your kitchen with queues and serverless functions

Posted by Aaron Newton on 11 May 2021

Azure Functions, Microservices, Service Bus, Serverless, humour

Introduction

If you’ve read part one of this series, welcome back. If you didn’t, it was an action-packed exposé on start-up life and the ways in which microservices will decrease your stress and your snack budget. Pour your beverage of choice and go read it.

In chapter two - the project hits the big-time. Serverless 

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Part 1: How to reduce your doughnut budget with microservices

Posted by Aaron Newton on 28 April 2021

Azure Functions, Microservices, Microsoft Azure, performance, humour

Introduction

In the early days of my career, monolithic APIs were common. SOAP and XML were still popular - REST and JSON were the new kids on the block.

I worked in a development team that had inherited a monolithic API. A bad deployment left multiple key systems inoperable, and our support lines were inundated to...

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Custom Distributed Tracing and Observability Practices with Azure Functions – Part 3: Implementation

Posted by Paco de la Cruz on 10 March 2021

Azure Functions, Integration, Microsoft, Application Insights, Technology, Microsoft Azure

Introduction

In the previous post of the series, we described the design of an approach to meet common observability requirements of distributed services using Azure Functions. Now, in this post, we are going to cover how this can be implemented and how we can query and analyse the produced tracing logs.

This post...

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Custom Distributed Tracing and Observability Practices in Azure Functions – Part 2: Solution Design

Posted by Paco de la Cruz on 24 February 2021

Azure, Azure Functions, Microsoft, Application Insights, Microsoft Azure

Introduction

In my previous post, I discussed why it is important to consider traceability and observability practices when we are designing distributed services, particularly when these are executed in the background with no user interaction. I also covered common requirements from an operations team supporting...

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