// Serverless

Your monthly digest covering a packed May 2022 — headlined by Microsoft Build! In this episode, Chris walks through Azure Container Apps going generally available (and why it's one to watch), the limited access preview of Azure OpenAI Service with GPT-3 and Codex models, Azure DNS Private Resolver for hybrid name resolution, Open Service Mesh extension for Azure Arc GA, NGINX natively integrated on Azure, AKS host process containers in preview, Azure Communication Services Email GA, hierarchical partition keys in Cosmos DB, and much more. Plus GitHub and Azure DevOps highlights from a very busy month for the developer ecosystem.

In this post, I show how I use GitHub Actions to call an Azure Function (through Azure API Management) that interacts with Google Analytics as part of the process to build my Hugo Static Site. The end result is that top posts are pulled into the Static Site Generation build process, rather than calling the Google Analytics API through JavaScript at runtime.

Quickly develop highly scalable integration solutions for your enterprise scenarios using Logic Apps. Join us as we explore the continuous integration and continuous deployment for Azure Logic Apps.

Azure Arc is a suite of Azure Services that simplifies management of workloads in a Hybrid and Multicloud deployment. You've likely heard about this from the Infrastructure or Virtual Machine perspective, but how can it help with your applications? We'll explore how App Services, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Event Grid and API Management Gateways can be deployed to on-premises and other clouds using Azure Arc!

Chris is joined by Karl Cooke (IrishTechie.com) for a deep dive into the CloudWithChris.com integration platform — a real-world Azure integration architecture built to automate content distribution to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit, and to amplify updates from the Azure, GitHub, and Azure DevOps blogs. The session walks through the full architecture: Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus topics and queues, Azure Table Storage, Azure Logic Apps, and a Vue.js management UI, plus a custom URL shortener for per-platform analytics.

Weekly Vlog #22 is a dedicated Microsoft Build 2021 recap led by the landmark announcement of Azure Arc for Application Services, enabling App Service, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Event Grid, and API Management to run on any Kubernetes cluster across Azure, AWS, GCP, or on-premises. Chris also presented at Build alongside Dean Brian and Carol Logan, demonstrating friction-free development with Blazor, GitHub Codespaces, and GitHub Actions while spotlighting UK developer communities. Additional highlights include a wave of AKS improvements, the Durable Functions Netherite storage provider preview, Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache, Azure Applied AI Services, and Security Center integration with GitHub Actions.

Weekly Vlog #20 celebrates hitting 500 YouTube subscribers ahead of schedule, then reviews one of Chris's most content-heavy weeks: Azure Pipelines-as-code tutorials, an event-driven architecture walkthrough using Azure Event Grid and Azure Functions, and a candid mental health live stream. The headline Azure announcement is Azure Static Web Apps reaching general availability with built-in CI/CD, serverless API integration, and free SSL. GitHub rounds out the episode with new hardware security key support for SSH operations and native video uploads to issues and pull requests.

Azure Event Grid routes blob-created events from Azure Storage to downstream handlers, enabling scalable event-driven pipelines where producers and consumers are fully decoupled. This Cloud Drop builds an end-to-end workflow using an Event Grid system topic, subject filtering, an Azure Storage Queue as the event handler, a system-managed identity with the Storage Queue Data Message Sender role, and an Azure Function queue trigger to process and remove each message.

You may have heard of Event-Driven Architectures before, but haven't had the chance to get hands-on and build one as yet. That's exactly what we'll be working through in this blog post!

Azure Functions supports PowerShell Core as a runtime stack, enabling PowerShell scripters to build serverless event-driven workflows without compiled code. This Cloud Drop demonstrates creating an HTTP trigger and an Event Grid trigger function, configuring requirements.psd1 to load the Az PowerShell module, and using a system-assigned managed identity with the Contributor RBAC role to dynamically tag Azure resource groups on creation.