Azure Functions at University of Oxford

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Guest blog by Johannes Goslar Microsoft Student Partner at Oxford University
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About Me

Let me introduce myself first. I am Johannes – usually called Johnny – Goslar. I got into development around 2011 by programming iOS games and am currently reading for a MSc in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. More information can be found at my LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannes-goslar-69b2943a/).

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On Tuesday the 13th of February we, the Microsoft Student Partners at the University of Oxford, ran our first workshop, with Azure Functions as theme.

Short summarisation if you never heard about it:

· We can write simple JavaScript functions

· We only need to reason about their inputs and outputs

· We can use the integrations to CosmosDB and other service offerings on Azure

· We do not need to care about hosting

· We do not need to care about process management

· We do not need to care about deployment (just one git repo to push/pull from if wanted)

You basically can save a lot of time. For more information either head to

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/

Workshop Material for you to use https://github.com/MSFTImagine/computerscience/

or see our slides at

https://www.slideshare.net/JohannesGoslar/azure-functions-88014679

Azure Functions from Johannes Goslar

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After some suspicious glances in the beginning we got everyone motivated and working on our tutorial.

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Everyone followed the steps as described in https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/uk_faculty_connection/2017/11/03/a-first-step-into-azure-functions-and-other-azure-services/.

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Fellow Microsoft Student Partners at Oxford were available to help, is help was required (and not only for the pizza on the table).

Summary

After one and a half hours everyone got something running. Students created a first Function app and successfully connected it to a message bus and a database. With many having fun setting everything up and the attendees all got a good quick starter for implementing your own ideas with Azure Functions and other Azure services.

Further Reading

Azure Function documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/

DB bindings: /en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-bindings-documentdb

Queue bindings: /en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-bindings-storage-queue

Azure Functions Workshop Resources if you want to run an event on your campus  https://github.com/MSFTImagine/computerscience