Cloud Native, Serverless

Start Your Azure Functions Learning Journey the Right Way with This Strategy

Earlier this year, I wrote about Serverless functions on Kubernetes and virtual Kubelet, which raised my interest to re-explore Azure functions. Also, with the launch of the Microlearning initiative, I decided to become a better storyteller on my journey of technology evangelism, so I created a full Azure functions jumpstart playlist. In this article, I will share my highlights and the strategy to learn Azure functions through the playlist, and I will come back to update this blog post from time to time as I will be working on more Serverless and Azure functions-related content in the coming days :

Table of Contents

Get started on Azure functions: what and why Azure functions?

Imagine you’re a developer. No matter what language you’re programming, you must set up your environment before starting to program. Azure Functions is a serverless FaaS offering provided by Microsoft Azure. With Azure function, you can take advantage of a ready-to-code environment to get started immediately. You can use it to build web APIs, process file uploads, respond to database changes, process IoT data streams, manage message queues, and so on. The following video helps you learn Azure functions with the latest .NET 7 in 8 minutes with HTTP trigger:

Getting started with Azure functions triggers and bindings

Azure functions enable the integration scenario with many Azure functions such as Azure Service Bus, EventGrid, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, etc. And this magic is enabled by using triggers and bindings.

A trigger invokes a function to execute. A function can only have one trigger.
Binding has a notion of input binding and output binding. A binding to a function connects another data source to the function.

The following video shows you how to work with one of the most popular triggers in Azure, which is the Azure Service Bus trigger :

Getting started with Azure functions custom handlers

Azure functions support multiple programming languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, typescript, PowerShell, etc. That language support we call language runtime. If you’re looking for extended language support such as Go, Rust, PHP, and so on, custom handlers in Azure functions are what you’re looking for.

An Azure function custom handler allows using any language that supports HTTP primitives and author Azure functions. With custom handlers, you can use triggers and input and output bindings via extension bundles, hence it supports all the triggers and bindings you’re used to with Azure functions.

The following video shows you how to work with custom handlers to build a serverless go application :

Next steps

I am planning to add more content in this blog post as well as our Youtube channel CloudMelon Vis. Follow this blog post or our channel so you won’t miss any upcoming updates. Let’s stay tuned!

Azure functions, Cloud Computing, Learning Cloud, Microsoft Azure, serverless, Serverless computing

Mélony Qin

I'm an entrepreneur, a creator, a published author of 4 books, and a tech product manager. I'm making content on cloud-native, serverless, generative AI from a techie's perspective. My content is tailored to help tech professionals excel in their careers in this field or even launch their own startups (aka technopreneurs).

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