By Maik van der Gaag March 9, 2021
This evening we have our fourth event of the season. While we were hoping that this event would be a hybrid or in-person event, circumstances are still forcing us to hold this event online.
The program for this evening:
19:30-19:35: Welcome and sorting out connectivity issues
19:35-20:20: First speaker: Marc Duiker - How to deal with complex workflows in serverless applications
20:30-21:45: Second speaker: James Randall - Contrasting Azure Functions and AWS Lambda
How to deal with complex workflows in serverless applications
Running one or two serverless functions is easy. But what if you’re rebuilding a complex workflow based on serverless that requires dozens of functions. How do you design and manage that?
In this session, I’ll cover building complex long-running workflows using Azure Durable Functions, an extension to Azure Functions that lets your define workflows in code (C# or JavaScript). Durable Functions allow you to:
Easily chain functions together, Perform fan-out/fan-in scenarios, Wait for external events, Use built-in support for retry policies to achieve a resilient architecture. I’ll show a solution built with Durable Functions which has been running for over a year now. In addition I’ll cover some advanced scenarios how to use multiple orchestrations, either in one function app, or across multiple function apps. By the end of this session you know how to keep your complex serverless workflows under control!
Marc is a lead consultant at Xpirit with a strong focus on event-driven architectures. He has extensive knowledge of the serverless offerings in the Azure platform and he enjoys helping organizations making effective use of cloud-based technology.
You might have seen Marc at a developer meetup or conference since he’s a regular speaker in the area of Azure cloud & serverless technologies. He even has a Youtube channel where he talks about Azure Functions.
In his spare time, Marc likes to give attention to the creative part of his brain. He likes to code visuals, music, and retro games, or he’s fiddling around with his synthesizers.
Contrasting Azure Functions and AWS Lambda
In this session we’ll compare the core FaaS offerings of AWS Lambda and Azure Functions with a whistlestop tour of the end to end development process, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they can fit into your applications overall architecture. The examples will be given from a .NET perspective but much of what we will discuss is applicable to other runtimes too and we’ll cover some of the tools that exist beyond .NET.
James is a freelance developer / cloud architect who has been delivering solutions on Azure since it launched and, more recently, on AWS and Digital Ocean. He’s generally focused on the .NET space and largely uses F# end to end today - however he has also spent time with other environments and started hiscareer back in 1994 with 68000 assembler and C. When he’s not at his keyboard, he can usually be found on his(pedal) bike.