Azure Study Guide — Chapter 1 (25–30%) + Implement Azure Functions

The first book chapter gives and introduction of websites that can be hosted on Azure. It also illustrates the main advantage of having deployments slots : allows you to swap between slots in order to gain time.With swaping is not possible to move some settings as publishing endpoints, custom domain names,ssl certificates and bindings or scale settings. Swaping also gives the opportunity to roll-back and reswap.

Swaping as some other operations(including web sites creation)used in Azure can be done by using the portal, PowerShell or Azure Comand Line Interface(CLI).

Azure use the concept of App Service Plan or Hosting plan that is created only during the web app creation.

Diagnostics, monitoring and analytics is also provided by Azure. You can have various types of logs and diagnostics can be retrieved using Visual Studio, SCM — Site Control Management (KUDU) , PowerShell, CLI or can be downloaded via FTP directly.

Within a website, there might be some webjobs as console application or batch files; that enables to perform operations, that can be scheduled, continus or executed on demand and that can trigger some operation.

Inside Azure, websites can be configured for scale and resilience. You can scale up/down by adding/removing compute power or you can scale out/in by increasing/decreasing the number of instances used. There is also an autoscale feature that affects all the instances. The patters used by Azure can be found here. The book gives an insight of the thorttling pattern, retry pattern and circuit breaker.

Chapter 1 also mention about Application Request Routing and there is a feature inside Azure Websites that effectively enables sticky session between cliend and the first instance with a cookie. This feature cand be disabled via custom header inside the app web config.

Implement Azure Functions

Azure Functions are small piece of code with pay per use model in order to pay only for the time your code runs. using a language of your choice. Nuget and npm dependencies can be also used.

Azure Functions, as described here, are very flexible and are usualy used to create triggers ,binding or webhooks.

Practice : Create Azure Functions