Azure Insights: Durable Functions; Kubernetes Service HCI; Logic Apps developer tools

Azure pros share their insights on Durable Functions, Kubernetes Service HCI and Logic Apps developer tools.

Orchestrating serverless microservices using Durable Functions

Srivathsan Sampathkumar, writing on the Serverless360 blog discussed the widespread adoption of microservices architectures.  Azure Kubernetes Service, Service Fabric and Functions can all help with the setup and management of a microservices architecture, but he opted to focus on orchestration with Durable Functions.

Microservices are independent modules that each handle a single action, he explained. Compared with "monolithic" traditional apps, they provide isolated points of failure, autonomous scalability and more rapid delivery. Durable Functions are an extension of Azure Functions, assisting with communications between microservices. Functions supports REST calls but lack dead-lettering, so users may want to opt for an offering like Service Bus to handle communication between microservices. He wrote:

Azure Functions are exposed to the Web App applications via the API manager and provide CRUD operations for each entity. These functions will invoke the Durable Function orchestrator for further processing. The Durable Function orchestrator can use a variety of patterns to utilize the Microservices as Worker Functions. In the above architecture, there are three most used patterns. The orchestrator can chain several workers, calling one worker based on the output of the previous one.

Common Kubernetes Service HCI challenges

Danny McDermott, writing on Crying Cloud took a look at some common "gotchas" when deploying Azure Kubernetes Service HCI. He noted four areas that users should watch out for. According to McDermott, the PowerShell module is more efficient than using Windows Admin Center. Initially a number of agents, scripts, binaries and OS images are downloaded to a working directory on the system running the WAC. PowerShell has the advantage of downloading only images needed at a given moment, allowing users to specify an image storage directory.