During Microsoft Build 2017, Microsoft has announced three cool features with Azure Functions,
- Integration with Visual Studio 2017.
- Application Life-Cycle Management.
- Functions Everywhere - New Runtime Engine .
Integration with Visual Studio 2017
- With the Visual Studio 2017 Preview - Version 15.3 onwards, you will get a new template called Azure Functions, which will allow you to write Azure Functions in native C# and F# , along with Python.
- New Visual Studio Integration will allow you easily write and debug Azure Functions.
- Visual Studio will create pre-compiled assemblies that you can deploy into funciton.
- Because it is pre-compiled you will get all mainstream C# functionality or .NET Functionality.
- It includes intellisense as well as unit testing functionality.
- While in local development you can attach debugger.
- In order to get Azure Functions in Visual Studio 2017, you first need to download and install Visual Studio 2017 Preview- V 15.3 with Azure Workloads and then you have to install Visual Studio tools for Azure Functions.
Application Lifecycle Management
- Now, we have capabilities to implement pre-production environment called slots.
- Microsoft brought this concept from App Service.
- This allow you to create pre-production environment for Azure Functions and also split the traffic between version now and version next and control the percentage of traffic that will go for each and then you can implement swap which will put your new code in production.
- That means, now you can build real application using Function in visual studio and test it in pre-production environment and then go to production.
Azure Function Runtime--also called Functions Everywhere
- Third one is Azure Functions run time.Code name of this project is Functions Everywhere.
- Here, we will get an installer which will allow you to set up either an Azure Function server on your Windows Server 2016 machine or on a Function Walker which is a smaller version of the runtime that just listens to event and that runs on Windows 10 creator update.
- These things come under Hyper-V containers.
- It includes some limited functionality of managing your workload, so if you publish your functions into that server piece that you can do from Visual Studio you can configure walkers to listen to it and run your code.
- You can imagine as soft of settings as a service, where you can have machines at your home which acts like a function server.
- Currently this is available on Windows OS but very soon this runtime would be available on Linux containers as well.
In New Azure Functions, you can also set an upper limit on how much money you want to spend on a daily basis.