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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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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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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In the past couple of years the software industry has come a long way in professionalizing the development environment. One of the things which has improved significantly is automating the builds and being able to continuously deploy software.
Having a continuous integration and -deployment environment is the norm nowadays, which means I (and probably you as a reader also) want to have this when creating Azure Functions also!
There are dozens of build servers and deployment tools available, but because Azure Functions are highly likely being deployed in Microsoft Azure, it makes sense to use Visual Studio Team Services with Release Management.
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