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Azure Functions and App Service Authentication with Auth0 and other OpenID Connect providers

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Azure Functions and Azure App Service recently added integration with OpenID Connect (OIDC) providers. We can now use any OpenId Connect compliant provider to authenticate users in our apps.

In this article, we'll look at how to configure Auth0 with Azure Functions. The same steps can be used to configure any other OIDC provider and can also be applied to Azure App Service.

Overview

To integrate an OpenID Connect provider with Azure Functions, we need to follow these steps:

  1. Obtain a client id and secret plus other config settings from the OIDC provider.
  2. Create an authentication config file in our app and add the relevant information from the OIDC provider to the file.
  3. Supply the client secret in an app setting.
  4. Enable file-based authentication configuration in the app.

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End-to-End Serverless Real-Time IoT with Python

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Python runs on IoT devices. It runs on Azure Functions. It runs pretty much anywhere!

In this article, we'll look at how to build an end-to-end IoT solution using Python. We'll send telemetry from a device to Azure IoT Hub. Then we'll use Azure Functions and Azure SignalR Service to send messages from IoT Hub to a Python app in real-time.

Overview

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Add Real-Time to a Java App with Azure SignalR Service

Friday, October 11, 2019

Azure SignalR is a fully managed service that makes it easy to add highly-scalable real-time messaging to any application using WebSockets and other protocols. SignalR Service has integrations for ASP.NET and Azure Functions. Other backend apps can use the service's RESTful HTTP API.

In this article, we'll look at the benefits of using Azure SignalR Service for real-time communication and how to integrate it with a Java Spring Boot chat application using the service's HTTP API.

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Large-Scale Serverless Machine Learning Inference with Azure Functions

Thursday, September 5, 2019

This article is part of #ServerlessSeptember. You'll find other helpful articles, detailed tutorials, and videos in this all-things-Serverless content collection. New articles are published every day — that's right, every day — from community members and cloud advocates in the month of September.

Find out more about how Microsoft Azure enables your Serverless functions at https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-functions/.

Azure Functions recently announced the general availability of their Python language support. We can use Python 3.6 and Python's large ecosystem of packages, such as TensorFlow, to build serverless functions. Today, we'll look at how we can use TensorFlow with Python Azure Functions to perform large-scale machine learning inference.

Overview

A common machine learning task is the classification of images. Image classification is a compute-intensive task that can be slow to execute. And if we need to perform classification on a stream of images, such as those coming from an IoT camera, we would need to provision a lot of infrastructure to get enough computational power to keep up with the volume and velocity of images that are being generated.

Because serverless platforms like Azure Functions automatically scale out with demand, we can use them to perform machine learning inferencing and be confident that they can keep up with high-volume workloads.

Without scaling, this is how slowly our app currently runs:

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Async Streams with IAsyncEnumerable in .NET Core 3

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

One of the most exciting features of .NET Core 3 and C# 8.0 has been the addition of IAsyncEnumerable<T> (aka async streams). But what's so special about it? What can we do now that wasn't possible before?

In this article, we'll look at what challenges IAsyncEnumerable<T> is intended to solve, how to implement it in our own applications, and why IAsyncEnumerable<T> will replace Task<IEnumerable<T>> in many situations.

Check out all the new features in .NET Core 3

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