Anthony Chu

With a recent update to Azure Functions, it is now possible to run headless Chromium in the Linux Consumption plan. This enables some serverless browser automation scenarios using popular frameworks such as Puppeteer and Playwright.

Update 2023-08-31: If you're having trouble running Playwright or Puppeteer on Azure Functions, check out Serverless Playwright the easy way with Azure Container Apps.

Browser automation with Puppeteer and Playwright

Browser automation has been around for a long time. Selenium WebDriver was a pioneer in this space. More recently, Puppeteer and Playwright have gained in popularity. The two frameworks are very similar. Google maintains Puppeteer and Microsoft maintains Playwright. It's interesting to note that some of the folks who worked on Puppeteer are now working on Playwright.

Puppeteer and Playwright each support a different set of browsers. Both of them can automate Chromium. They automatically install Chromium and can use it without extra configuration.

Azure Static Web Apps is a great place to host Blazor WebAssembly apps. Among Static Web Apps' many features, it has built-in support for authentication using social logins. In this article, we'll look at how we can take advantage of Static Web Apps Authentication in our Blazor WebAssembly apps.

Overview

Azure Static Web Apps takes care of dealing with identity providers like GitHub, Twitter, and Facebook. The frontend application can then access the user's credentials using a built-in API.

Blazor WebAssembly supports custom authentication providers. We'll look at how to set up an auth provider for Static Web Apps and use it in the app. We'll also look at how to properly secure certain functionality in the app so that only authenticated users have access.

Azure Static Web Apps will soon have native support for building and deploying Blazor WebAssembly. For now, take a look at Tim Heuer's article on how to deploy it.

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.

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.

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.