Speaker: Marco De Sanctis

Level: 300

Azure Functions are the Microsoft offering in Azure for serverless compute. Thanks to an incredibly simple programming model, you can very easily have your code responding to HTTP requests and interacting with a variety of other Azure services, allowing you to build an API layer in minutes.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what the Azure Functions SDK allows you to do. Thanks to Durable entities, for example, you can build an actor model in the cloud, in which each instance has its own lifecycle, state and primitives. Expose it via HTTP, and you effectively have a stateful API layer, running on a serverless infrastructure.

During this talk we’ll investigate when such a modelling pattern is useful, expose some of the challenges of managing Durable Entitites and learn a few tricks to work around them.