AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Implement and Configure Azure Functions

Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that lets you run code in response to events without managing servers. Functions use triggers and bindings to react to data changes, HTTP requests, or scheduled events. You only pay for the execution time of your code, which reduces costs compared to always-on services. This model lets you focus on business logic while Azure handles infrastructure.

You can build and debug Azure Functions with Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Azure CLI, or Azure Functions Core Tools. These tools offer project templates, local emulators, and direct deployment capabilities. They support languages like C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and custom handlers for Go or Rust. With integrated debugging and deployment flows, you can test locally and push changes seamlessly to the cloud.

Creating a function app in Azure involves a few simple steps:

• Sign in and select Azure Functions: Create Function App in Azure.
• Provide a globally unique name, choose your runtime stack, region, and authentication type.
• Azure then provisions the following resources:
  • Resource group for logical organization
  • Function app as the execution environment
  • App Service plan defining compute resources
  • Storage account for state and code deployment
  • Application Insights for monitoring and logs
  • Managed identity for secure service access

After creation, configure your function’s host.json and application settings to define triggers, bindings, and connection strings. Triggers determine how functions start, while input/output bindings simplify data access without writing SDK code. For better performance and reliability, tune settings like alwaysOn, runtime version, and scaling limits in your host configuration.

Azure Functions offers multiple hosting plans to suit different scenarios:

• Consumption plan for automatic, pay-per-execution scaling
• Premium plan for warm instances, VNET integration, and larger memory
• Dedicated (App Service) plan for predictable costs and reserved resources

Integrate with Azure Monitor and Application Insights to track execution counts, durations, and failures. Adhering to best practices—such as using least-privilege identities, resource tagging, and automated deployments with ARM templates or Bicep—ensures your functions run securely and scale reliably.

Conclusion

In this section, we explored how to implement and configure an Azure Functions app using various development tools and languages. We covered the steps to create a function app, the resources Azure provisions, and how to set up triggers and bindings. We reviewed performance tuning through settings like alwaysOn and scaling limits, and compared hosting plans to match different workload needs. Finally, we emphasized monitoring with Azure Monitor and Application Insights, along with best practices for security and automation.