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Seamless Integration of Azure Functions With SQL Server: A Developer’s Perspective

Azure Functions Overview

Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that enables developers to run code on-demand without having to worry about infrastructure. It provides an easy way to build and deploy event-driven, scalable, and cost-effective applications that can be triggered by a variety of sources such as HTTP requests, messages, and timers. In this article, we will explore how to invoke Azure Functions from SQL Server using C#.

As a developer, you may need to integrate Azure Functions with SQL Server to leverage the power of cloud computing and enhance your applications. In this article, we will explore how to accomplish this using C#.

Prerequisites

Before we start, make sure you have the following:

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Building a QR Code Generator with Azure Functions

Here's a fun project if you want to learn how to build Azure Functions. This project is going to be a little silly but educational.

We will build a QR Code Generator that runs 100% within an Azure function. There are thousands of QR Code generators on the internet, so this is a silly exercise, but I wanted to push the limits of what an Azure Function can do, show you how cool they are, and inspire you to build cool stuff with them.

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Build a Serverless App Using Go and Azure Functions

Webhook backend is a popular use case for FaaS (Functions-as-a-service) platforms. They could be used for many use cases such as sending customer notifications to responding with funny GIFs! Using a Serverless function, it's quite convenient to encapsulate the webhook functionality and expose it in the form of an HTTP endpoint. In this tutorial, you will learn how to implement a Slack app as a Serverless backend using Azure Functions and Go. You can extend the Slack platform and integrate services by implementing custom apps or workflows that have access to the full scope of the platform allowing you to build powerful experiences in Slack.

This is a simpler version of the Giphy for Slack. The original Giphy Slack app works by responding with multiple GIFs in response to a search request. For the sake of simplicity, the function app demonstrated in this post just returns a single (random) image corresponding to a search keyword using the Giphy Random API. This post provides a step-by-step guide to getting the application deployed to Azure Functions and integrating it with your Slack workspace.

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Serverless vs. Microservices Architecture: Is This the Future of Business Computing?

Serverless computing, which is commonly referred to as just Serverless, is a promising cloud-based technology model that has emerged on the app development and software architecture horizon in recent years. Trying to avail themselves of the huge serverless framework potential, many big-time market players have been quick to jump on the cloud services bandwagon. Such software giants like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon already offer the customers to migrate all the local business operational efficiencies to be hosted on their flagship serverless platforms like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions.   

Simply put, serverless architecture is an event- and request-driven tech solution allowing application developers to create actionable working environments in the cloud that have all the necessary computational resources needed for a smooth coding flow. This framework comes in handy especially when time is an issue and the tasks assigned are quite resource-intensive.

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Rethink the Journey to Being Cloud-Native

Today’s increasingly fast-paced innovation in the area of enterprise application architecture added numerous buzz words in our vocabulary such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, service mesh, Beanstalk; to name a few. Novel advanced use cases and in fact sophisticated use of cloud computing are transforming IT professional’s lingo. The core foundation of theses innovation lies in building cloud-native infrastructure i.e. adopting containerization and implementing microservices-based architecture in the application development lifecycle. The velocity of these innovations is so much that the technological gap between monolithic applications and microservices is getting wider every day.

The term cloud-native is very loosely and widely used. The tendency of just “Lift and shift” of monolithic applications does not make one cloud-native. It is like virtualizing workload and run it on someone’s else datacenter or sever. It should be carefully assessed and ensure that it is aligned with the needs of proposed outcomes, as it is quite challenging and will be for quite a while.

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Practical Serverless: A Scalable OCR Solution in 10 Minutes

Introduction

In this article, we will show you how to create a serverless solution for implementing a scalable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. In a system like this, scalability is a requirement. At certain times, we can expect possible bursts of traffic into the system where we need to process all of these requests and communicate the result back to the user in a timely manner.  To cater to this, we need a system that scales dynamically. One possible solution is to model the required workers and deploy them in a Kubernetes environment to achieve our scaling requirements. This approach has been implemented and discussed in this article.

Here, we will implement the same solution using Azure Functions in Ballerina (referred to as Ballerinalang in the rest of the article) and show how it can be implemented with considerably fewer lines of code, which resulted in lesser complexity and better maintainability.

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Provisioned Concurrency: The Silver Bullet to AWS Lambda Cold Starts

The year 2014 marked the start of the serverless era with Dr. Werner Vogels announcing AWS Lambda to an ecstatic crowd at AWS’ esteemed re:Invent. What was promised was a compute service abstracting away all the pains of cloud orchestration, thus leaving the user to only worry about the business logic they would run on these magic little worker nodes spun out of thin air and pure engineering.

Even though AWS Lambda was not the first FaaS service out there, with a startup called PiCloud being the first FaaS provider back in 2010, AWS was the first major cloud provider to jump into the race. In fact, it can be argued that AWS is actually the one that kick-started the serverless era, soon followed by Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions by Microsoft. By 2017 the cloud wars intensified, with more and more providers descending upon the battlefield, all championing one promise, no more orchestration needed.

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How to Build a Serverless App With Vue, Azure Functions and FaunaDB Part 3

The FaunaDB database is up and running and the Azure Functions are developed and tested locally. In the final part of this three-part series, we will build the Vue.js app to manage notes by creating new ones and reading existing ones. The app will be communicating with the Azure Functions which will be communicating with the FaunaDB database.

Note: You can find parts one and two of this series at their respective links. 

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How to Build a Serverless App With Vue, Azure Functions and FaunaDB Part 2

Go serverless with Azure

This article is the second part of our three-part series on building a serverless application with Vue.js, Azure functions, and FaunaDB. In this section, we'll focus on building out Azure functions to work with our application's database. 

Azure Functions

Azure Functions are hosted on the Azure public cloud. With it, you can build small computing units called “Functions,” host them on this cloud, and trigger them based on a variety of event triggers, such as: HTTP Trigger and a new message arriving to Azure Service Bus Queue.

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How to Build a Serverless App With Vue, Azure Functions and FaunaDB Part 1

We don't be needing this in this tutorial

Serverless Functions/APIs are best used when building static websites. Static websites are still relevant in many purposes, including a company portfolio page, meetup group page, product pages, or blogs, to name a few.

When developing such apps, the use of a full-blown backend API (ASP.NET, Node.js, PHP) is excessive and unnecessary. Usually, your app performs simple tasks, such as sending out a few emails, handling form submission, and managing a few records in a database.

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Azure Function Build Release Pipeline in Azure DevOps CI/CD

Playing with Azure Function is always a nice feeling, and it is very important to configure both build and release pipeline for all of your applications. Azure Functions are not different. In this article, we will see how we can create both build and release pipeline in Azure DevOps for our Azure Function application. I hope you will like it.

Prerequisites

You should have an Azure Function application to configure the build and release pipeline for. You can either create a new one in the Azure portal, or you can use any existing Azure functions available on the internet. For example you can see one here.

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Lessons Learned from A Legacy Serverless App

Keeping in mind the growing multi-cloud trend, developers should start working with more than one provider. However, this can mean leaving your comfort zone, and not everyone likes the idea of doing that. Recently, I’ve done this and would like to share my experiences with you. I believe they are useful, regardless of whatever cloud platform you are using/are going to use.

We have a legacy serverless application hosted on Azure Functions. There were some issues with it: