As I mentioned in my earlier post, there are 2 options available to you out of the box for logging. You can either use the TraceWriter or the ILogger. While this is fine when you are doing some small projects or Functions, it can become a problem if you want your Azure Functions to reuse earlier developed logic or modules used in different projects, a Web API for example.
In these shared class libraries you are probably leveraging the power of a ‘full-blown’ logging library.
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Creating a solution with multiple small services is great of course. It provides you with a lot of flexibility and scalability.
There are however a couple of things you have to think about when designing and developing a solution with multiple services. One of the things you need to figure out is how to implement proper logging. For an actual production system you need to have this in place in order to monitor and debug the overall solution.
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So you might remember me posting about using the Let’s Encrypt site extension for Azure App Services, called Azure Let’s Encrypt, created by SJKP.
This has quite well for over a year now and even works for Function Apps.
However, last month I got notified my SSL certificate was expired on one of my sites. Strange, as an automated job should just handle this for me. I thought the job probably didn’t execute because of some glitch in the matrix.
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In a couple of weeks, on the 22nd of February, I’ll be talking at a free event organized by 4DotNet and SnelStart called Move Up with Azure. I’m not the only one who will be speaking over there, there’s also a great session by Henry Been (SnelStart) and an awesome talk from Christos Matskas (Microsoft).
I myself will be talking on how to create a serverless solution using Azure Functions. This of course is a very broad subject and I’d like to know what you think I should focus on or what you would like to see covered in this session?
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Warming up your web applications and websites is something which we have been doing for quite some time now and will probably be doing for the next couple of years also. This warmup is necessary to ‘spin up’ your services, like the just-in-time compiler, your database context, caches, etc.
I’ve worked in several teams where we had solved the warming up of a web application in different ways. Running smoke-tests, pinging some endpoint on a regular basis, making sure the IIS application recycle timeout is set to infinite and some more creative solutions.
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A new year has started, so it’s time to reflect and think of what we’ll be doing the rest of this new year.
2017 has been a great year for me, not only from a technical point of view, but also personally.
First of all, I have had the chance to be an amazing dad for our son. Being a dad is the best thing one can imagine. Seeing the joy in your child’s eyes whenever you get home and seeing him grow up so quickly is just amazing!
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Using certificates to secure, sign and validate information has become a common practice in the past couple of years. Therefore, it makes sense to use them in combination with Azure Functions as well.
As Azure Functions are hosted on top of an Azure App Service this is quite possible, but you do have to configure something before you can start using certificates.
Adding your certificate to the Function App Let’s just start at the beginning, in case you are wondering on how to add these certificates to your Function App.
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So, one of my previous customers reached out to me a couple of weeks ago. They had a question concerning on how to use dependency injection in their AutoMapper profiles. For this project we were using profiles which were dynamically loaded inside the application using MEF and were using Autofac for dependency injection.
The way you would normally load all of these profiles is by using the AddProfiles method when initializing AutoMapper.
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You might remember me writing a post on how you can set up your site with SSL while using Let’s Encrypt and Azure App Services.
Well, as it goes, the same post applies for Azure Functions. You just have to do some extra work for it, but it’s not very hard.
Simon Pedersen, the author of the Azure Let’s Encrypt site extension, has done some work in explaining the steps on his GitHub wiki page.
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(Almost) No one likes writing code meant to store data to a repository, queues, blobs. Let alone triggering your code when some event occurs in one of those areas. Luckily for us the Azure Functions team has decided to use bindings for this.
By leveraging the power of bindings, you don’t have to write your own logic to store or retrieve data. Azure Functions provides all of this functionality out of the box!
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