Getting started with Azure Python functions

What are Azure functions?

Functions allow to run serverless code, code that you run only when you need it and that doesn’t need a whole infrastructure to live in. You can decide that a function is triggered when hitting an HTTP endpoint, or when new files are added into a blob storage for instance. It might always perform the same task, or it might do something different depending on your inputs. Basically, you can write code that does (almost) anything you can think of and host it as an Azure Function.

It’s really convenient and as a bonus, it’s cheap: you pay a fraction of a dollar for a million requests and the first million is free — that is unless you decide to go for the hosted plan (like a regular web app) and not the consumption plan.

For more information on Azure functions, take a look at the documentation.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to create an HTTP triggered function and receive and return data. To illustrate the use of external libraries and show how the code can be segmented, we’ll create a function that performs text processing, and we’ll finish by publishing it to Azure.

1. Create a new function app

The documentation explains well how to get started quickly with Azure Python Functions…