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What Are Azure Functions?
Azure Functions provides Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS). They may be compared with AWS Lambda; however, we will find significant distinctions in their setup, one being consumption plans and app service plans, which allow Azure to manage infrastructure resources.
In contrast, dedicated app service plans allow pre-provisioning resources Azure functions use.
Azure Functions are serverless methods designed to enable developers to run small bits of code quickly and to expedite application creation while taking care of infrastructure requirements.
Azure manages everything for you!
Microsoft Azure Functions, or Function as a Service or FaaS, are an offering from their cloud service infrastructure that automatically scales your applications when under heavy demand.
Azure Functions offers Azure services for .net developers an entirely serverless solution where Azure manages infrastructure management, allowing them to focus solely on writing code.
This approach utilizes small pieces of code that require specific triggers in order to work (for instance HTTP Endpoints, Timers, Azure Storage Queue, and Azure Event Hub).
A trigger might be an HTTP request, timer event, or simply receiving messages through Azure Storage Queue.
Azure Function's architecture is stateless; functions run for no more than 10 minutes at any one time before becoming inactive and being recharged only if your code ran during that period (Azure pays you only when running it, no matter if the function was active or standby).
NuGet and NPM support is provided along with support through Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio IDE, or Azure Portal when creating new functions; users may create them through either of those channels as well. Azure supports various languages; please see this list of supported runtime versions on Azure Function.
Azure Functions Consumption Plan
As previously discussed, Azure functions consumption plans enable us to delegate responsibility of scaling solutions over to Azure, freeing azure services for developers up from worrying about servers, networks, scaling, and infrastructure costs - not to mention reduced infrastructure costs thanks to automatic reduction to zero when not used within a consumption plan - meaning your Azure bill won't increase as a result of this function goes unused - all that matters here are costs associated with usage such as bandwidth (if applicable); server costs; hosting costs such as memory; networking requirements etc and billing for these elements plus infrastructure costs related costs is included here as part of your payment; your bill covers these items:
- The number of requests handled by your department
- The amount of memory & time the function uses to fulfill the request.
The performance of your code can also impact Azure billing.
The Other Side Of The Coin
Use an Azure consumption plan to lower your bill; using cold starts may add another expense.
Functions associated with consumption plans can be scaled back down to zero by Azure; all servers that run your functions when your API isn't being utilized will be disabled, eliminating costs related to it.
However, if a request comes through after this has happened, a VM needs to be provisioned immediately for Azure to start processing it; this period is known as cold-start time.
Cold starts can also occur if your request volume increases dramatically. Azure needs to start or provision additional functions to accommodate all requests.
Azure continues its efforts to improve cold starts for FaaS services.
- Even when there is little traffic, the VMs will continue to run for 15 minutes.
- To be able to serve customers in the near term, they will start more virtual machines than are needed now.
- They will reduce the startup time of the VMs that run the functions.
As a developer, you can speed up cold start times by decreasing package/artifact sizes; alternatively, avoiding cold starts altogether may prove even more effective in cutting cold start times down to size.
- Keep reading to learn more about how you can "warm up" your functions.
- Try to keep the duration of function calls as short as possible. Your function code should be fast so that many requests can handled by a single VM instance, resulting in fewer cold starts.
If cold starts are an issue for your application, consider the Azure functions Premium plan as it fits nicely with consumption billing and keeps at least one instance running of each function to prevent cold starts and create minimal infrastructure costs for them.
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Why Is Monitoring Azure Functions Or Function Apps Necessary?
Performance Optimizer
Azure Functions and Function Applications can be monitored to maximize their performance by measuring execution time, resource consumption, and other performance indicators.
Monitoring these aspects allows you to identify bottlenecks and optimize Azure resources allocation.
Issue Detection & Troubleshooting
Monitoring tools make it possible to quickly diagnose and quickly detect issues within your functions. They allow for faster troubleshooting times as they help identify root causes that explain why something behaves unexpectedly - helping reduce downtime.
Scalability & Load Management
Azure Functions will scale automatically according to demand; however, you must monitor how they cope with increased workloads to determine whether any adjustments need to be made for handling different loads.
Resource Utilization
Azure Functions utilize various resources, including CPU, memory, and storage space. Monitoring resource consumption patterns allows you to allocate them efficiently while preventing resource exhaustion, which could result in performance degradation or failures.
Azure Functions Monitoring Best Practices
Selecting Target Metrics For Anomaly Detection Is Key
to successfully monitoring Azure service is selecting appropriate metrics for measuring resource performance.
Target metrics can be established by recognizing trends within metrics data and tracking changes over time, with particular consideration given to metrics that have experienced substantial shifts or digital transformations.
Here are a few metrics to keep an eye out for in an Azure Function App services:
- Function execution count
- Function execution units
- Response Time
- HTTP 404
- HTTP server errors
- Memory Working Set
You can detect:
- Unusual load on the Function App
- Insufficient computing power
- Memory consumption by threads that run across all functions
Find The Best Monitoring Solution
There are various monitoring service solutions for Azure integration service available today, but finding one to meet the unique requirements of your business activity monitoring may prove challenging.
Extensive technical and business research must take place before making this selection. Azure Monitor remains an effective primary continuous monitoring solution for smaller organizations. Additional third-party tools become necessary as businesses grow more prominent with increased resources or complex architecture.
Compelling Alarm System
Finding solutions quickly requires quickly detecting anomalies within an organization and informing internal teams as soon as they occur.
A well-organized alerting system is critical to reduce risks proactively while being prepared for unexpected events; furthermore, it helps organizations pinpoint possible areas for improvement and identify possible areas for change.
Setting Up A Powerful Dashboard
Dashboards provide you with a flexible workspace to easily monitor resources and view real-time values via graphs and charts.
Dashboards allow you to collate data from various Azure services into one convenient place for viewing, offering clear insight into resource performance while helping make critical decisions easier.
Building goal-oriented dashboards gives you greater clarity into performance metrics for resource optimization and aiding decision-making processes.
Auto-Healing Approach
Not all violations require manual correction; automatic remediation is often sufficient to mitigate vulnerabilities that impact computing performance.
Intelligent alerts and automatic actions can significantly boost uptime.
Also Read: A Comprehensive Overview of Azure Cloud Security Systems
Azure Monitor: How To Monitor Azure Functions?
Azure Monitor is a monitoring tool that makes it simple to manage Azure services.
Real-Time Dashboard
Azure Monitor has dashboard widgets dedicated to Function Apps, which display metrics based on time settings. Customizable metrics widgets let users show metrics according to their personal preferences.
Choose between various charts to visualize real-time metrics in real-time, including Line Charts, Area Charts, Bar Diagrams, Scatter Diagrams, and Grids.
Log Explorer
Are the Application Azure Log analytics Available for My Function App in Azure Portal? By running queries against this resource path in the Azure portal, you can examine application activity log associated with a Function App: Azure Function App-> Monitoring->Logs
Query Monitoring
Monitor Azure Functions trends and errors by setting up monitoring. Enter a query, click New Alert Rule, and create an action group before setting alert logic so they'll send alerts as necessary.
Alerting System
Monitoring Function logic apps is vital in order to guarantee their optimal performance without adverse data trends compromising them.
Create alert rules by selecting New Alarm Rule in the dashboard, specifying their logic for alerts.
To send alerts, select your target metric first, then specify thresholds, frequencies, and action groups. Azure integrations Monitor alerts have one fundamental limitation: they can only track one entity using various metrics configured.
The Downsides Of Azure Monitor's Azure Functions Monitoring
Complexity: Azure Monitoring features and capabilities can be complex for novice users to configure correctly, especially custom monitoring rules and alerts, which need to be set up separately for different monitoring sets.
Cost : Based on your monitoring needs and resource types to monitor, Azure Monitor costs may escalate quickly.
Furthermore, costs could escalate further should you require fine-grained monitoring data storage or store monitoring data over an extended period.
Flexibility and Customization : Azure Monitor offers many predefined monitoring options; however, when customizing to meet individual monitoring architecture needs, it becomes necessary for more profound knowledge to achieve specific customizing needs.
To realize specific customizations may require additional knowledge or even expert-level expertise.
The complexity of Integration: Integrating Azure monitor with other tools or services provided by third-party vendors may require extra work; seamless compatibility might prove challenging to ensure.
Alert noise : Settling oversensitive or poorly calibrated alerts can result in alert fatigue. As you will receive many alerts, it becomes hard to distinguish the noise from critical issues.
Monitoring of Cross-Resource : To monitor multiple resources and services that interact, cross-resource queries may need to be set up - this requires a more complex configuration than average.
Also Read: How Microsoft Azure Is A Perfect Cloud Solution For Smbs?
Improve The Performance Of Azure Functions.
Before diving deep into how we can optimize the performance of a function and the code it runs within it, we must understand its context of use and which code runs only once at startup versus which code gets executed during every request.
We need to establish which parts are run only at initial setup versus which bits get run repeatedly during usage of our function.
Reuse Connectors
Reusing connections is critical to improving the performance of any function. For instance, creating the Azure SQL database connection outside of any function invocation and then using that connection for future invocations of that function should improve performance significantly.
Reusing all HTTP outgoing (outbound) connections should also be encouraged for maximum effect.
Code from this example shows how database and HTTP client settings are defined outside the scope of any function; since the code only runs at startup, connections will likely be reused over the lifecycle of a virtual machine that hosts this function if they're not reused; otherwise, you could experience unexpected delays due to port exhaustion from load balancers causing port exhaustion issues.
Your durable functions do not have an outbound public IP address; Azure Load Balancers use the SNAT (Server Name Autonumber Translate) feature to grant access to the public internet.
Since Azure Load Balancing uses fewer ports and releases them within 10 seconds, using HTTP connections multiple times is vital; further details regarding SNAT are found here.
Local Cache Data
Caching data in your code can be an excellent way of decreasing external connections. If your program uses Azure Key Vault certificates to create JSON Web Tokens, for instance, they should only need to be retrieved once and stored outside the context of any function; that way, you reduce external calls significantly.
When employing caching techniques, it's also crucial that you know exactly which data can be cached, as well as when and if this data will become outdated or irrelevant.
Cold Starts
Due to Azure's scaling mechanism, optimizing the application code's startup time and package size is crucial. To achieve optimal performance, keep the size of your package as small as possible for optimal results; Azure downloads it when starting new functions/VMs which could take significantly more time when downloading large packages compared to smaller packages.
To reduce its size:
- Make use of "Run From Package". Your code will be downloaded as a zip file; this could lead to significant enhancements when used with JavaScript functions that contain many node modules.
- Reduce package size with language-specific tools, like JavaScript applications.
Next, we must optimize the startup performance of application code. In particular, this means verifying that any setup performed by functions at startup falls under their responsibility; one way of doing this might include checking to see that Azure database and tables exist before startup instead of expecting functions to create database tables on demand as part of their job description, create them through continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline instead.
CosmosDB tables can be retrieved using these methods:
This code checks to see if a database already exists by opening up a connection with CosmosDB. As stated before, however, this connection is unnecessary, and this function should not take responsibility for creating it; use Terraform or Azure Resource Management template instead for database creation.
Keep Your Functions Warm
Reduce cold starts. One effective method for this is calling your function every 5-10 minutes to ensure Azure keeps at least one instance running.
For maximum effectiveness and monitoring capabilities, combine this call with health checks as you call your function to simultaneously monitor the performance and health status of its instances.
Health checks on external systems such as databases are critical to ensure everything runs as planned, while knowing whether services and functions run effectively will also ensure all connections have been created adequately during health checks and users can reuse them again later.
Azure application development services Insights makes an effective monitoring solution, with basic ping tests taking place every 5-10 minutes using HTTP calls made via Azure App service Insights' HTTP call API Management.
No charges are applied unless alert rules and notifications are enabled.
Cosmosdb Specific Improvements
Configuring Cosmosdb Client
CosmosDB Client can be configured in many ways to reduce network calls executed by SDK. You may opt to turn off endpoint discovery based on your use case; doing this will prevent additional calls made to CosmosDB from obtaining all write and read locations from CosmosDB itself; instead, it will use the endpoint you provide.
Endpoint discovery will help to increase availability. However, if only one location is configured, this key feature can be turned off without adverse repercussions.
Use A Newer Version (Or The Latest) Of The Sdk (3.9.2)
Utilizing the most up-to-date SDK is always recommended; we noted when reviewing our performance that creating the CosmosDB Client was taking too long.
After changing our connection policies, the SDK did not call any external services when creating CosmosDB clients. To determine why, we began digging deeper and found more information from it - such as... Prior SDK releases utilized the OS package (Windows-release package).
Due to this dependency, when accessing Windows-based functions, they were often slow. Following discussions with Azure Support about this issue, they informed us that version 3.9.2 no longer utilized such dependency - released one day after we informed them.
Below, you can observe variations in performance over time, as this graph shows the average times it took to create CosmosDB Clients every half-hour, starting September 29th around 6:30 AM UTC; you'll note a reduction by multiple seconds from previous days' data.
Azure Function Pricing.
Azure Function offers three different pricing models. These;
Consumption Plan: Azure manages and calculates resources using this plan, billing only when our code runs - meaning we only pay for what time is used!
App service plan: Your functions can serve as web applications. Scaling can either be automated or manual.
Premium Plan: Use this plan to develop responsive applications without being plagued by cold-start issues, as you can define unlimited function execution time (60 minutes guaranteed), which creates virtual connections and makes for smooth development processes.
More information on hosting plans is available at:
Cold Start Problem With Azure Functions
Azure durable Functions fulfills all infrastructure requirements needed for our applications to run seamlessly, taking all worry out of running them for azure free services for developers
When used under Consumption Plans, initial performance might be delayed slightly because Functions run on shared systems; 20 minutes should pass between calls as they wait in idle mode before switching back online for their second call and becoming active again.
Avoiding cold ties by choosing an App Service bus Plan can help. When making this selection, remember that we will work on specific sources for 24 hours and pay additional charges as necessary.
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Conclusion
This blog tries to keep things as succinct and straightforward as possible; there's much more to take into account when starting with Functions; we discussed: - What is the Invocation Context for Functions? | Cold Starts and Mitigating Their Impact >> >> How Caching Data Locally Within Functions.
| Best practices when Reusing Connections or Improving CosmosDB Startup Performance
Azure Functions are serverless services created by Azure to simplify application development. By taking away infrastructure responsibilities and freeing us to focus on writing code instead of worrying about hosting costs for our applications, this approach saves costs while at the same time activating and running functions becomes cost effective - you only pay when they activate and run! Azure Portal and Visual Studio make creating, testing, and deploying Azure Functions easy and affordable.
