Chapter 1, Developing Cloud Applications Using Function Triggers and Bindings, goes through how the Azure Functions runtime provides templates that can be used to quickly integrate different Azure services for your application needs. It reduces all of the plumbing code so that you can focus on just your application logic. In this chapter, you will learn how to build web APIs and bindings related to Azure Storage Services.
Chapter 2, Working with Notifications Using the SendGrid and Twilio Services, deals with how communication is one of the most critical aspects of any business requirement. In this chapter, you will learn how easy it is to connect your business requirements written in Azure Functions with the most popular communication services, such as SendGrid (for email) and Twilio (for SMS).
Chapter 3, Seamless Integration of Azure Functions with Azure Services, discusses how Azure provides many connectors that you could leverage to integrate your business applications with other systems pretty easily. In this chapter, you will learn how to integrate Azure Functions with cognitive services and Logic Apps.
Chapter 4, Understanding the Integrated Developer Experience of Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions, teaches you how to develop Azure Functions using Visual Studio, which provides many features, such as IntelliSense, local and remote debugging, and most of the regular development features.
Chapter 5, Exploring Testing Tools for the Validation of Azure Functions, helps you to understand different tools and processes that help you streamline your development and quality control processes. You will also learn how to create loads using Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS) load testing, and you'll look at how to monitor the performance of Azure Functions using the reports provided by Application Insights. Finally, you will also learn how to configure alerts that notify you when your apps are not responsive.
Chapter 6, Monitoring and Troubleshooting Azure Serverless Services, teaches you how to continuously monitor applications, analyze the performance, and review the logs to understand whether there are any issues that end users are facing. Azure provides us with multiple tools to achieve all the monitoring requirements, right from the development and maintenance stages of the application.
Chapter 7, Developing Reliable Serverless Applications Using Durable Functions, shows you how to develop long-running, stateful solutions in serverless environments using Durable Functions, which has advanced features that have been released as an extension to Azure Functions.
Chapter 8, Bulk Import of Data Using Azure Durable Functions and Cosmos DB, teaches you how to leverage Azure Durable Functions to read and import the data from the Blob storage and dump the data into Cosmos DB.
Chapter 9, Implementing Best Practices for Azure Functions, teaches a few of the best practices that you should follow in order to improve performance and security while working in Azure Functions.
Chapter 10, Configuring of Serverless Applications in the Production Environment, demonstrates how to deploy a function app in an efficient way and copy/move the configurations in a smarter way so as to avoid human error. You will also learn how to configure a custom domain that you could share with your customers or end users instead of the default domain that is created as part of provisioning the function app.
Chapter 11, Implementing and Deploying Continuous Integration Using Azure DevOps, helps you learn how to implement continuous integration and delivery of your Azure Functions code with the help of Visual Studio and Azure DevOps.