all right what do you guys what do you guys get ready to film we are going to do a visual studio tool box at the soda I'm one of the co-hosts of visual studio tool box to show that Robert Green started and myself and Batman Brown there now co-host the episodes and I have my guess you Jeremy yeah I just randomly wandered into the studio I'm actually a cloud developer advocate and have been doing a ton of things without your functions we're going to talk about serverless today both compute with functions and then we're going to do another episode that focuses on cosmos DB which is the less server version of the database I always say flip it backwards what's cloud developer advocate I advocate for developers in the Clausura less is less server it's not no server yeah and then a full-time job I'm actually the product manager for visual studio team services which is our DevOps cloud offering so I have a lot invested in Azure and I mean this guy did a so pretty recent about that as well so being able to Jeremy in the show a lot more stuff together I'm sure all right well we're ready to get started and talk about as your functions so Jeremy why don't you kick it off those what are we gonna talk about today in detail yeah so one of the best ways to get familiar with the technology I think is the dog food it right and I wanted to talk about a project that I made that's my own URL link shortener so you're familiar with these we have a kms here for example who isn't know exactly and what I wanted to do was take ownership over the data so I'm very interested in when do people click through links what links generate the most click throughs right is it Twitter is it LinkedIn is it Facebook is it one of these social media sites yeah and then I wanted to also look at different statistics like what time of day is the most popular time of day for people to click or day of the week so I thought what better way to leverage functions and server lists than to build a link shortening tool awesome so what don't we just roll it back just a little bit because I think sometimes people might be watching the video and they're like what would it what are you talking about what is this functionary so at like five words or less summary what is functions and we are talking about something on a so it's a cloud hosted thing but what does functions give to a developer well if you're going to restrict me to five words I would say events and code right it's functions but but the idea when we talk about server less I like to flip it backwards and say it's less server yes so it's the ultimate realization of focusing on your code and not having to worry about necessarily how your codes hosted it's not even platform-as-a-service because we're not necessarily talking about web applications right we're talking about some sort of event that triggers the code and then we're talking about the code that actually runs right and that code could occur in that the X or Y right it's all it's all dependent on what you do in the implementation it's not specific the code doesn't care what you do with it you can write to to a script file something you could generate some data it could execute a web service call it could return something to to an end user but really it's agnostic it doesn't care what codes inside of it I think that's something that you and I took awhile to overcome as a train of thought right this is like you said a function in the cloud right I mean it feels to me like the ultimate realization of the dream that's microservices if you will I hate to use an overloaded term it's a valid term in this case I mean so some of the things that are really neat about functions are number one you can write them in different languages I'm gonna demonstrate it in dotnet through Visual Studio but you can do them in Python PHP node.js you can even write bash shell scripts that launch function so that's one neat thing the other cool part about the way Azure implements functions is we have a concept of triggers and bindings and these are ways we set up the environment to allow us to interact with things like storage and queues and and it can be file storage it could be blob storage and it makes it really easy for the developer to work with those resources and I'm going to show that in the application that I built that's awesome well let's jump into it it sounds like a great demo alright so what I'm going to do is is jump into the portal right now so I've already deployed this application I'm going to take a step back and show how this is built but I want to set the stage with the link shortener that I have I wrote a web front-end but just to focus on the function side it's a small window but you can test functions directly from with inside the the UI which is pretty cool yeah so what I've loaded up here is a link that if I just paste this link in a new tab you can see goes to some of the azure functions documentation so if I run this through the tester I'm just going to click run here it will go out and call that function and I see a little completed success and I get some text back that has what is the short URL that I can use for tracking so I'm just going to copy that and paste that so you can see the way the experience works so jli K which is my first name and part of my last name dot M e right and then BW is the short URL when we hit this it goes through my function and redirects now for the end user it's a very simple experience you just end up where you're going for me a ton of data is generated from that that really simple event right if we have collects quite a bit right it does and looking at that I actually wrote the part that shortens the URLs I wrote that as a script that's this run script so you can see my shortener there's an encoding routine but the the main part of this grabs a request and you know obviously if I have no requests I'm going to return and say basically not found there's nothing there we get the input we check the input for null we go through and basically I'm tagging if it's coming from like Twitter or LinkedIn or some other things and then at the end of the day I'm really just creating a record here that map's the short URL to the long URL and I'm saving it to table storage and that's it so when I'm putting the link in it's here's the long link and then give me something short back that I can use yeah now the real power of this comes from this function host that I have here and by the way all of this code is available on github so I open-source this so people can work with this project yeah well link it in the show notes definitely right so the the redirect comes in and this is when you're hitting the short end point so you're hitting the the BW e for example so what happens here is it'll grab that short URL and then I have a keepalive that sort of pings the server make sure it's running I also get requests from robot so I tell them not to follow right because this is my link shortener yeah and then we come out and we go in to table storage now this little piece of code here where you can see the start time and I'm starting a timer this is something that I love about functions because when you create the function app you can check a box and say you want to use application insights and this will automatically start building telemetry and analyzing response times and basically giving me the feedback I need to know the health of my application right what I wanted to do is because I'm using table storage is I wanted to measure how long it takes to read from table storage so with this telemetry I have this operation that goes out to the table and finds the long URL if it gets it back it says it found it gets that redirect URL and it's tracking how long that operation took and this is that's the most sensitive operation you don't people to wait when they're being redirected that's I mean it happens all the time now these public link shorteners you get to some URL and write events whining whining whining exactly so I wanted to test that and I wanted to just highlight how easy this was to put this custom data and I literally am tracking tables storage that's the thing I'm tracking retrieve is the action I'm taking and then I'm just passing it how much time elapsed the first two like strings it or they have any bigger significance or they're just the way you decided to store just the way I decide to categorize the data with application insights and then it's as simple as two two steps one is I want to do some more operations with this data but I don't want to slow down the redirect so I'm going to add some information to a queue that I can pick up in process later right now the event is an HTTP trigger it came in and requested an endpoint I throw this on the queue and then I redirect them that's it that's the redirect code then I have will ignore keep alive for now I have this process queue so again we said that serverless functions were events in code right in this case the event is there's an item in the queue and my code pulls that off and does some additional processing so I'm breaking apart the message in this code and I'm writing some custom information one of these is what I call a custom event which is literally this came in from Twitter or this came in from LinkedIn the source yeah right and then the other thing so you can see I do the the track event here the other thing I'm doing and that's actually adding a document I'll get to that into a minute there is a page view so with this piece of code I'm highlighting a page view so now I know which page it actually went out to so I'm saying what was the medium what was the page right and I'm adding that all through application insights and I want to show what that looks like and then this is a piece that we can probably dive into at another time because this is creating a document for Cosmos DB and I added this on later I started just tracking through application insights but then I decided to create a Cosmos DB database because then I can stand up a power bi dashboard and do some exciting things around that well and so what what is it Cosmos DB database or those they don't know yeah it's the actually the function is serverless compute the cosmos DB is a server list database it's a not only sequel right no sequel document based database that's hosted in the cloud what's really neat about cosmos DB is that you can pick your interface we have a document DB interface that was developed for the previous incarnation document dd what well it was cold document DB when it first came out on Azure right was you know very comparable to that's how people wasn't talked about it at Microsoft Center no sequel space and then more recently be renamed at the cosmos so there's any confusion out there that's sorry Microsoft love to rebrand but right the product has been very solid very you know long development cycle already for it and then quite you know the the cloud scale player I think is what they often call it right this lady right lives in a ton of data centers as a concept and use the developer of powerful flexibility to deploy your data across the world well you do you you get to choose your consistency levels and you get to just click with replication which is pretty powerful and the other thing I'll point out is this is using the document DB interface and the reason why I call that out is because you can use sequel syntax to query with document DB however there are a ton of developers are used to MongoDB as you mentioned yeah and you can use a MongoDB interface and write an application around so it's very flexible in that respect yeah it's very cool that you have these options and you know I'm a sequel developer most of my life and I've been toying with no sequel I kind of like it and it's awesome to see this not not really stopped me because I actually start with is my first database that I learned you know just the basics around that that claim me I'm a developer yet on that space right having sequel I didn't realize we've even added that so that's awesome I'm working something new in each episode here and that's what I'm finding out with cosmos DB it's so easy I'm a sequel developer myself I worked with it for 15 years yeah so I had that mindset transition to a document DB but after standing up actual applications using this for my analytics I'm finding out that it's not only easy to work with but it is scalable and fast which is is everything someone wants and I don't have to hire a DBA yeah it's literally inexpensive I run this shortener on my own subscription through Azure and one of the huge benefits I see four major functions is I only pay when someone clicks through the the function yeah right and with the model I get a million calls per month right now I'm sure it may change at some point but with that it's literally pennies for me a month I think last month there was a quarter for the storage and the function calls so cheap to handle and it's 2,000 requests a day yeah it's pretty cool that the thing about you know all of this technology on top of azure is that you you are living in the cloud that your credit card is plugged in they're yours or your companies or whatever in the trial we do give you a limit so if you want to now go over the free trial limit we provided an azure but I'm always kind of encouraging developers thinking about moving to the cloud as the first things they think about telemetry so it's awesome to see application in size built-in you actually want to know what's going on with your cloud service it's not just you know consuming your resources of your service it's going to cost you money potentially depending on how much you know requests come in and people just need to think that way it's a right slightly different world you know the other day money matters so it does and speaking of application insights what I thought I would do is show some of application insights just so people can see and this is just the check mark out-of-the-box when I created the function app and some of that custom code and I want to show the reports that it gives back and then we can look at what it looks like to create a function from scratch three visuals thank you let's take a look so let's pop over back to the the website so this is the the function app I had running and I've got all these features that are configured one of the things I wanted to call attention to is this is using a feature functions called proxies and that allows me to map one route to another route so the function app itself is something like blah blah blah as your web sites dotnet slash API slash URL redirect question mark short URL equals totally friendly which is is not a short URL so in in my proxies and you can see this in in the code this is part of that code base I've mapped what is a short URL right here so just slash and what the code is to that longer URL and that allows it to translate behind the scenes no one sees that happen and and Maps it on to that longer function so I have my custom domain and then I have the azure functions running behind it cool if we come into the application insights portion the very first thing that application insights pulls up for me which I love is the overall health of the system so we've got this live stream which I'll show you in a second but this is really informative to me here because this has given me an overview of response times over time and you can see that I'm averaging a few hundred milliseconds but this is across all of my services so it's not necessarily just the redirects right you can also see a count of requests and then up here we've got something called smart detection this has actually alerted me several times when it finds something that's outside of the norm it will automatically email me and tell me you know what your redirect usually only takes a hundred milliseconds suddenly it's taking two seconds you should look into it it automatically does that and when I click on it if there was a smart detection it also helps me diagnose and shows me the sessions that were slow sessions so I can look into them and try to figure out what's going on I'm gonna scroll down here to performance and when we see performance this will let me pick so overall you can see 122 milliseconds what's really important to me is the redirect experience right that's what the end users are experiencing so we've got a 94 millisecond average and if I want to drill into more detail I can come up here and over in this graph I've got my percentiles so I can see what the 99th percentile looks like and you can see the majority Falls even faster than that yeah so and this is the least expensive version of functions you can back it with beefier servers but even with minimal resources it's still giving me this type of performance the other piece is because I tracked that custom application insights telemetry if I click on dependencies you're gonna see my as your table storage operation right and you can see the average there is 17 milliseconds which is more than fast enough for my needs and what I'm doing here yeah it's cool the fact that you can drill down all the way from like what the requests are doing overall to the custom tracking that you did but in a particular block of code I think that's super powerful the fact that it alerts you is even more awesome I've used application insights kind of since the beginning I'm okay in some products so I do have dashboards but I haven't implemented recently and it's cool to see it even though they added that new automatic notification yeah it's pretty cool the other thing that I call this the the sad portion of the application because it is sad to think that you might be sitting in a hotel room watching the livestream of your website saying it so when clicking it is someone clicking it but it's a think it has its own level of use Melissa when you when you sort of create something this is your your baby one of your babies now you know better or worse it's it's fun to watch so this is a live set of requests and as the requests come in it's it's going to show me those and I may actually force the issue over here but let's go ahead and do a redirect and I'm just going to the generic as ER Doc's so that's the shortcode to land on the azure documentation you can see it here I'll show me the request that showed me how long it took and then I have all my trace information on the side so if I want to drill into details I'm not going to click on this now because it'll go into IP addresses a Mac and like everything you want to know about right session but you can drill into the detail the other piece with app insights and again this is just out of the box without me adding anything is this nice little tab right here for lytx if I click on this it's going to drop me into basically everything that it stores is Coria Bowl for insights so I can set up pie graphs and charts I'm gonna just open up my folder here and look at mediums over the past 24 hours and run that and this will give me a pie chart that breaks down Twitter clicks LinkedIn clicks blog clicks etc so you can see Twitter is definitely my main medium of choice for for generating links yeah yeah I remember somebody showing showed me this at ignite actually this this is like a sequel light language right yeah yeah they call the language itself but it's to me when I saw the first times ago this is the sequel close enough I guess it allows you to query all the various parameters and this is again this is the back end of application insights data has been collected it's not any other kind of data but but it can I think be mixed with other kind of data sources to give you a more holistic view of your environment if you have complex deployments these doesn't help the person described this I mean the dumb right ya know it cannon it's all prompt able if I'm inside and I start to type it's giving me a tell us and intellisense so it'll walk you through creating these these queries and that's exactly how I built the one you just saw and I'm gonna open top page views and we'll just do this talk these rolled ones you built yourself right yes they didn't have those and it saved it for me and then I just drop in the table and I could see channel 9 it's actually one of the more popular links in the bag 24 hours right so that's always nice to pull up on the fly we've got a juror this is actually interesting these are all Microsoft properties I actually do tweet other links but these are the popular ones for 24 hours yeah that's cool so that's the application insights experience let's pop over to visual studio and just show someone what it looks like to start a new function out yeah that's really great I think I think it's awesome when we show how we did something and we provide the code but often forget this part right exactly how do you get started yeah so the the prerequisite here is I'm working with at least 15.3 right so it's a preview version of Visual Studio 2017 right think we're up to 15.5 any of those versions will work for functions yeah if anybody has been kind of away from the visual studio versioning game for a while that's the versioning scheme we've gone to and if you like go into about dialogue for a second under the help menu sure yeah you'll be able to show so if anybody has any doubt which version they're on you can jump in there and there's 15.4 preview of that particular you know preview branch and you can install side by side so I have always the RTM version and the preview right machine it tends to work really well I've never had any issues asterisk a string like now you said it I know I care but your machine in your environment users out there yeah that's how people know in case they don't know which version yeah so once you have that install and you have to pick the cloud work load will go into a new project and as your functions lights up and the way I like to talk about this we talked about a Vincent code the function is the actual piece of code that gets executed the function app is the host for those different events and pieces of code right so you have a host that's what this as your functions is it's a minimal amount of you know stuff around it to make it work as a function and the rest is up to you right so what this will do is it'll create an empty project for me that's just ready to host an endpoint so then I can click on that and add a new item and fortunately these are sorted alphabetically so as your function comes up right off dial this yeah that that's convenient and I'm just going to give this a name of echo name and click add and what will happen is it's going to create a class for me the entire experience for functions within Visual Studio is is attribute driven so it's very easy to add what we call bindings or connections to things like table storage and queues what I'm gonna do is create an HTTP trigger this says basically you know what call this piece of code in response to an HTTP request which is a pretty common scenario and I'm making it anonymous so anyone can test it out and access it but you can we support permissioning but for our example here right no big deal and I think they also good just to connect line so we've gone the dependency is like what NuGet packages is this team bringing into to make this the default so you just got the function SDK and that's about it it's very bare-bones at this point there's no application inside there's no you know there's no gunk if you don't need that stuff it's not right by default free right and then if you want to start tracking custom telemetry you would just you know add a new get package going to the Explorer and add that that experience yeah I think if your right click on dependencies it would give you that yep as reference so what we've got is our async task and what's coming out of this is a response message because we have to respond to the request what's going into it is a trigger there's two types of parameters we're typically gonna pass a trigger is what actually causes it to get called and then a binding is something we might interact with and I'm going to show how to do a binding in a second cool so we've got this anonymous it supports getting posts the routes no here's to the request and here's the log and by default it creates some code that expects you to put the name in the request body or in a quarry string and it's gonna echo it back right but what I want to show is before we even touch a j''r I've downloaded the prerequisites I've created a function app I can put a breakpoint right here and press debug and what will happen is it's gonna run a full version of the function host right on my laptop and we just announced that we have this experience available cross-platform cool so it's not just Windows machines this will run on on Linux as well and and Mac OS nice so it's a been waiting for that when I give I kept hearing it was coming in it's awesome that we we finally announced that I I missed that part not not that I'm a Linux person or anything I still run a PC so I'm quite biased alright I spent a lot of time I actually was having fun running the function host in my Ubu - on Windows 10 yeah through the windows subsystem for the neighbors I should try then accessing it so all I'm doing is pasting the URL it gave me and you can see we hit the breakpoint and if I continue for that it's going to slap my wrist and tell me that I needed to pass a name so we'll go ahead and give that a name name equals vs toolbox hey Brandon go and we hit our breakpoint again and we'll go ahead and continue through that and what we'll see is it'll echo back and say hello this toolbox so that's a great start we've got it running locally we were able to debug it let's take it one step further and load it into Azure what I'm gonna do is just right click and go into publish and the publish experiment experience will allow me to create a function app in the portal and connect to an existing one or I can spin up a completely new application right from right here so we're gonna use live there earlier put the publish experiment that hey sometimes the world can be a public experiment yeah we're gonna try for the publish experience today let's see if we get that so we're gonna call this my vs toolbox app use my subscription and I'm gonna give it a second to spin because what's validating is making sure that is indeed a unique application name yeah I'll give it an agree eating the cloud you know resource that's assigning it to to the research group of your choice or new ones so there's a lot a lot to do there but you never have to leave the ID in this case right I'm gonna pick a location will do West us since we're filming here and let's the biggest machine can we do here oh my goodness you would want to do this right so one thing I do want to call out I can pick these various course to back my experience I can also pick the consumption plan the consumption plan is what I call the easy button for functions I don't have much control over size of the servers but I'm allowing Azure to do all the scaling for me it will automatically look at incoming requests and do what it feels it needs to do to accommodate those listen there's always trade-offs right if you have dedicated machines you can configure them to be always on so they're ready to start where with the consumption plan it may go to sleep and you have a new request and it takes a little bit longer to start up but again you have flexibility of options and I think consumption there's a reason to go at a price wise right there's some different right that's a good deal if that's good enough for your production environment right and that's what I'm using for my redirect experience as well I just have a cheat a little bit with a keepalive that pings the server to keep it awake yeah well that's valid they know you're consuming it nobody feels cheated in a dream I'm sure right yeah know it they're keeping an eye on you but for good reason that's right yeah so this is going to deploy there's really I like to share when people are watching this spin there's two steps to this the first step is creating the assets to host the application so it's going to create a resource group which if someone's not familiar with Azure that is a a logical group of related assets I think of it as life cycle if something's going to be created or destroyed with something else so you have an app and a database if they're related they probably belong in the same resource group and you can track cost by resource group and you can script out and even delete entire resource groups yeah it's a very powerful idea at first that was you know when resource groups were introduced I was a bit frustrated like another thing to do there's a girl wait oh there's a lot of benefits to this other thing to do so now I don't even think about it twice I really started to memorize resource groups I'm getting that bad on my glasses my out of my miscellaneous one if I need to just throw something out versus okay this is a bunch of real stuff together then I group right and it's great to if you're giving demos or meeting meetups or user groups because you can create a resource group for that experience and go through the same demo but partition it off so once it spins up those assets it's got the hosts it's got the function app the function app has storage with it next thing it does is builds and creates a set of assets that it then bundles up and deploys out so the first step is what is my target and then the second step is publishing and now it says publish succeeded so what we'll do is we'll just copy this in point right here I click copy to clipboard and we'll paste it in and notice now instead of running off localhost I'm doing the full my vs toolbox after we selected that was the unique name yeah and we called it echo name I believe so if we hit that it's going to spin up and it should slap me on the wrist again and tell me that it's expecting me to put a name inside the corey string and what we're seeing right now is that spin up you know for the first time and we'll let that go and and I always encourage people to use the mouse trick right if it's a clockwise mouse rotation should speed things up for that that is definitely the matter right there I mean you know Jeremy's magic tricks and look at that so please pass the neighbor Cory string now that it's spun up if I correct this and we'll do this again name equals vyas toolbox boom immediately it comes back hello vs toolbox and that that's the experience so basically I showed you how to create the function app from scratch from visual studio but then if you want to see what a mature application looks like something I'm using in the real world then that's going to be on the the github site for the link shortener that I created yeah and the fact that you can write this thing many languages the fact that it's so globally hosts the bowl I mean it's it's amazing what you can do nowadays it is yeah the only thing I don't have in production for more recent stuff is probably functions but we should some find some excuse do to put a function up there but it's cool yeah yeah no it's a great experience and and it's something that I'll be looking at too is is how do we take existing web applications and migrate them where it makes sense just because you can't move them doesn't mean you have to but where it makes sense because ultimately what happens is instead of one app with five endpoints that if you make one update you have to redeploy the entire line with the function you can literally just test and redeploy that one endpoint in isolation and you know you are very familiar with DevOps and and that experience and being able to continuously deploy at a micro service level is a huge benefit in my book yeah it's super awesome in the fact you can monitor it you can really get a sense of T to roll something back how is it doing or if there's any underlying performance issues in the infrastructure like the table storage slow down whatever I mean I have lots of flexibility nowadays to understand what is going on with my production environment and my staging environment if you put everything up on Azure you have all that same telemetry for all your environments which is really awesome right I've always loved love that part of a my def the Devon's experience is awesome right to get you going but get it up in the cloud you get all Morris or a benefit absolutely I'm digging am a one-man shop right with your shorting tool but I get all the telemetry and information I need to make sure it's running and up and healthy awesome well is that all you wanted to demo for this particular there was epic all right well thank you for being on visual studio toolbox and we hope you folks enjoyed the episode we'll make sure we'll put the links to the github repo and to any other resources we mentioned in the show notes and we hope you come back again and watch another episode of visual studio toolbox so thank you Jeremy for being on and see you folks later thank you see ya [Music]
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