I delivered a session at TechBash 2018 about serverless. It covers:

• What is serverless?
• Why is serverless useful?
• How is serverless implemented (with Azure examples)

You can download the full presentation ⬇ here.

Learning all about #serverless computing from @jeremylikness at @techbash pic.twitter.com/tNB8SgpORi

— Anthony Chu (@nthonyChu) October 3, 2018

I delivered several demos during the presentation that I pre-recorded to avoid Internet hiccups and edited to zoom to the right information. These are all “live” in the sense the only editing is cutting out some of the delays. The videos are designed to be self-explanatory and contain no audio.

Azure Functions

The first demo illustrates creating a serverless Azure Function from the portal. In addition, it shows how auto-scale works. After creating the function, I run a load-balancing tool called artillery to hit the endpoint 10,000 times and then show live metrics as it’s happening.

The next demo uses my open source serverless ShortLink project to illustrate how to publish it to the cloud.

Logic Apps

I demonstrated a simple workflow to introduce Logic Apps. The scenario is that I have “the world’s loneliest Slack channel” and need a way to get things going. I create a Logic App that triggers on a file upload. The workflow grabs the stream of bytes for an image, passes it over to the Cognitive Services Computer Vision API and applies some machine learning to create an automated caption. It then sends the results into the Slack channel. This is all built and demoed live.

Event Grid

I concluded the presentation with my favorite topic and what I believe is an underappreciated and underused service in Azure: Event Grid. The first demo shows how easy it is to connect different Azure services together with Event Grid by subscribing to a storage event from an Azure Function.

The next demo illustrates how to create a custom event that you can publish to from any language or platform and subscribe to from any platform that supports WebHooks.

I hope you find this presentation and related demos informative and valuable. As always, comments, feedbacks, and suggestions are welcome. For a comprehensive look at the content from this session, be sure to view/download the free eBook “Serverless apps: Architecture, patterns, and Azure implementation.”

Regards,