Did you use to give your servers cool or funny names? And did they all have their own personality? We're no longer waiting for these kinds of 'pets', are we? What's the difference between PaaS and Serverless? In this session we will show what Serverless solutions can and cannot do, using services from Azure like App Service, Logic Apps and Azure Functions. We'll try to entertain you and hope to give you some knowledge and inspiration for your developer toolbox. Slide deck for the session "Dude, Where's my Server?" held at the Betabit Rotterdam office on September 20th 2017.

1. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Oscar van Tol
o.van.tol@betabit.nl
@oscarvantol
Rick van den Bosch
r.van.den.bosch@betabit.nl
@rickvdbosch
Dude, Where’s my Server?
about Serverless computing

2. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Who’s who?
Oscar van Tol Rick van den Bosch

3. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Agenda
PART I
What is Serverless?
Serverless vs. Alternatives
NoOps?
Benefits & Drawbacks
Tools
Microsoft Flow
demo
Azure Logic Apps
demo
PART II
Azure Functions
demo
Flow, Logic Apps & Functions
Function Extensions
BONUS: Azure EventGrid
Best Practices
Conclusion

4. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
What is Serverless?
Does Serverless mean that there are no servers?
Does Serverless mean that there are less servers?
Maybe Serverless is not a great name...

5. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
I want to go on that ride, Daddy.
Source:

6. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
About Serverless…
“Serverless is not just a fad or buzzword.
{…}
With serverless, you need only worry about your code
and how it is triggered. The platform takes care of the
rest.”

7. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Serverless computing defined
• Abstraction of servers
• Event-driven scale
• Micro-billing
Focus on apps
not servers

8. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Serverless and Serverless
• Backend as a Service
• Functions as a Service

9. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Backend as a Service
• 3rd party applications / services in the cloud to manage server-side logic and state
• Applications using them were the first to be called Serverless
• Rich client applications (SPA or mobile apps)

10. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
(Mobile) Backend as a Service: Example

11. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Function as a Service
• Server-side logic written by developer
• Run in stateless compute containers
• Event-triggered
• Short-lived
• Fully managed by 3rd party

12. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Functions as a Service: Example

13. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Serverless vs. Alternatives

14. IaaS, PaaS & SaaS
IaaS PaaS SaaS
MIGRATE
to it
DEVELOP
on it
CONSUME
it

15. IaaS, PaaS & SaaS & FaaS
IaaS PaaS SaaS
Containers
Serverless

16. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
“Most PaaS applications are not
geared towards bringing entire applications
up and down for every request, whereas
ServerLess platforms do exactly this. …”

17. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
NoOps?

18. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
NoOps?
• Serverless might mean ‘No internal SysAdmin’
• But Ops still needed for…
• Monitoring
• Deployments
• Security
• And the rest (they normally don’t have time for)

19. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Benefits & Drawbacks

20. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Benefits: Costs
• Economy of Scale
• BaaS:
• Less development
• Less infrastructure
• Less ops
• FaaS:
• Only pay for the compute you need

21. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Benefits: Ops
• Simpler scaling
• Reduced packaging and deployment complexity
• Time to market / experimentation

22. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Drawbacks: Inherent
• Vendor control
• Vendor lock-in
• Multitenancy
• Security concerns
• FaaS == stateless

23. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Drawbacks: Implementation
• Execution duration
• Testing
• Monitoring / Debugging
• Lack of tools & experience

24. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Tools

25. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
First wave
• Many barriers to developer productivity
• No debugging support
• No local development experience
• Monitoring was hard
• Serverless became popular despite these downsides

26. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Now
• Tooling and local development experience unique among cloud vendors
• Azure Functions runtime for local development
• Triggering off Azure events (hybrid debugging experience)
• Application Insights integration
• Live event stream
• Runtime metrics
• Log custom metrics
• Alerts

27. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Microsoft Flow

28. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Flow?
“Microsoft Flow is a product to help you set up
automated workflows between your
favorite apps and services to
synchronize files, get notifications,
collect data, and more.”

29. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Connectors
150+ and counting
Not only Microsoft apps & services
http://bit.ly/dwms-flowconn

30. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Flow templates

31. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Microsoft Flow Pricing

32. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Microsoft Flow
Let's code!
Actually, not really...

33. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Azure Logic Apps

34. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Logic Apps?
“Automate the access and use of data
across clouds
without writing code”

35. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Logic Apps!
Out-of-the-box Connect and integrate data B2B and enterprise
Connectors from the cloud to on-prem messaging in the cloud
Take advantage of Tap into Azure Services
BizTalk Server investments

36. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Logic Apps!

37. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Isn’t this just Flow?
• Both are configuration-first integration services
• Flow is built on top of Logic Apps
• Flow is Business oriented, Logic Apps are developer oriented
• Logic Apps are a part of Azure
Flow empowers any office worker to perform simple integrations without going through
developers or IT
Logic Apps can enable advanced or mission-critical integrations where enterprise-level
DevOps and security practices are required

38. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Flow or Logic Apps?

39. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Example Logic app

40. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Logic Apps Pricing

41. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Azure Logic Apps
Let's code!
Well, almost...

42. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
BREAK

43. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
When were Azure Functions
first introduced?

44. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Azure Functions

45. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Azure Functions

46. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Azure Functions
Manage apps,
not infrastructure
Develop your way
Bind into services

47. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
What can you do?
• Timer-based processing
• Azure service event processing
• SaaS event processing
• Serverless web application architectures
• Serverless mobile back ends
• Real-time stream processing
• Real-time bot messaging

48. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Triggers

49. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Routing
Default: http://<yourapp>.azurewebsites.net/api/<funcname>

50. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Routing
Url: http://<yourapp>.azurewebsites.net/api/products/electronics/123

51. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Routing
All functions routes are prefixed with api by default
Can be changed:

52. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Throttling
• maxOutstandingRequests
Too many: 429 Too busy
• maxConcurrentRequests
Default: unbound
• dynamicThrottlesEnabled
Checks system performance counters
Default: false
> 80%: 429 Too busy

53. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Limitations
The default timeout for Functions on a Consumption Plan is 5 minutes
Can be increased to 10 minutes

54. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Scaling

55. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Dual abstraction
Serverless abstracts away the compute
Bindings abstract away the services you interact with

56. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Functions Pricing

57. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Billing example - Resources

58. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Billing example - Executions

59. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Let's code!
Finally some real code!

60. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Flow, Logic Apps & Functions

61. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
When do I choose what?
• For simple business optimization, use Flow
• More advanced integration, DevOps need or security compliance, use Logic Apps
• Highly custom transformation or specialized code, use Functions.

62. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Putting it all together
You can…
• … call a logic app in a flow
• … call a function in a logic app
• … call a logic app in a function
“Integration continues to improve.
Any investment you make in
these three technologies is worthwhile.”

63. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Function Extensions

64. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Functions Extensions
Durable Functions http://bit.ly/dwms-durable
• Function Chaining
• Fan-out/Fan-in
• Stateful Singleton
• Human Interaction & Timeouts

65. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Azure EventGrid

66. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Event Grid?
Simplify event
consumption
Build reliable
cloud apps
Focus on product
innovation

67. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
What is EventGrid?
• Fully managed
• Intelligent
• Event routing
Allows for uniform event consumption using a publish-subscribe model
Enables you to react to relevant events across both Azure and non-Azure services in
near-real time fashion.
Allows you to easily build applications with event-based architectures

68. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Concepts
• Events
• Event sources/publishers
• Topics
• Event subscriptions
• Event handlers
What?
Where?
For who?
Where to?
Handle it!

69. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Concepts

70. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Reacting to Blob Storage events
Azure CLI
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.EventGrid
az feature register --name storageEventSubscriptions --namespace Microsoft.EventGrid
Subscriptions are added to the Preview Program as capacity is available.

71. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Example uses
Serverless application architectures
Ops automation
Application integration

72. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…
Functions Best Practices

73. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Best practices
- Avoid long running Functions
- Cross Function communication
- Call
- Queue
- Storage
- ?
- Functions should be Stateless (and Idempotent)
- Create defensive Functions
- Don’t mix test and production code in the same Functions app
- Use async code but avoid blocking calls
- Keep Functions small & fast

74. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
And then…

75. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Conclusion
• Still in the early stages
• Push better architecture (micro-services!)
• Reduce time-to-market

76. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Resources & links
Azure Functions Documentation http://bit.ly/dwms-azfunc
Twitter @oscarvantol
@rickvdbosch
Blog Oscar van Tol
Rick van den Bosch

77. © Betabit Nederland B.V.
Shameless Plug
Microsoft TechDays 2017
12 & 13 october
RAI Amsterdam
Friday October 13th -->

78. Bedankt voor je aandacht
© Betabit Nederland B.V.