In a previous blog post, I shared how easy it is to create a globally distributed, highly-available, low-latency application with Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, and Pulumi.
Today, I want to show how the same approach can be generalized for any cloud compute service, including containers, virtual machines, and serverless functions.
In this post, we’ll take a look at 10 “pearls”—bite-sized code snippets—that demonstrate using Pulumi to build serverless applications with Azure Functions and infrastructure as code. These pearls are organized into four categories, each demonstrating a unique scenario:
Every non-trivial application relies on configuration values that may depend on the current execution environment. Some of these values contain sensitive information that shouldn’t be shared publicly. In general, the fewer parties that have access to those secret values, the safer the application will be—in fact, in an ideal world, no one would be granted direct access to those secrets.
Pulumi is excellent at connecting multiple cloud components into a cohesive application. In my previous post, I introduced the way to mix JavaScript or TypeScript serverless functions directly into the cloud infrastructure programs.
Today, I will build a serverless application with both the data store and the HTTP endpoint located close to end users to ensure prompt response time. The entire application runs on top of managed Azure services and is defined as a single Pulumi program in TypeScript.
Static websites are back in the mainstream these days. Website generators like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby, make it fairly easy to combine templates and markdown pages to produce static HTML files. Static assets are the simplest thing to serve and cache, so the whole setup ends up being fast and cost-efficient.
Many platforms offer services to host such static websites. This post explains the steps to create the infrastructure to do so on Microsoft Azure.
Today’s guest post is from Mikhail Shilkov, a Microsoft Azure MVP and early Pulumi user and contributor - enjoy!
Serverless compute services, like Azure Functions, offer an amazing power to application developers to leverage: highly available, automatically scaled, low-ceremony, pay-per-value functions created in several lines of code.
Today’s guest post is from Mikhail Shilkov, a Microsoft Azure MVP and early Pulumi user and contributor - enjoy!
Today I want to guide you through the process of developing Pulumi programs to leverage Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services. My language of choice is TypeScript—a powerful and expressive typed language, which is very familiar to many Azure users.
Azure consists of dozens of cloud services, from VMs to Kubernetes to Serverless. In my experience, a lot of customers choose Azure for its strong portfolio of PaaS-level services.
Azure App Service is a well-established managed compute offering to run web applications, RESTful APIs, or background workers. Azure SQL Database is a fully managed service to run relational databases with features like high availability and backups available out-of-the-box. Enriched by services like Azure DevOps for CI/CD and Application Insights for APM, PaaS is a powerful way to get the benefits of the cloud without the need to fully re-architect software solutions.
The power of relying on PaaS is evidenced by significant customer adoption. App Service is among the most popular compute services in Azure:
If you use automation (ARM, scripts, TF, …) to define and deploy Azure infrastructure, which services are your primary target? Vote & RT!
– Mikhail Shilkov (@MikhailShilkov) April 23, 2019
Nonetheless, PaaS services pose different challenges to application developers. In particular, the usage of multiple cloud services demands an investment in infrastructure automation. That’s where Pulumi comes to the rescue.
