Tag Archives: serverless

How I keep 30 Chocolatey packages up-to-date without losing my mind

As of this writing, I manage 29 packages on Chocolatey.org. One thing it’s imperative package authors do, though, is keep their packages up to date as new versions of the software they’re wrapping get released. Without this, packages simply atrophy and the value of Chocolatey goes down. That said, managing nearly 30 packages would be an all-consuming task if I was forced to monitor all the various distribution channels as well as hand-roll updates to them whenever they were released. So how do I do it? Let me show you.

Make Serverless Music – Orchestrate your workflow with Azure [Part 4 – Durable Functions]

The last in the series, a walk through on taking our problem statement and implementing it with the new abstraction from the Azure Functions team, Durable Functions

Make Serverless Music – Orchestrate your workflow with Azure [Part 3 – Azure Functions]

Create a simple workflow orchestration using Azure Functions, executed both sequentially and in parallel

Make Serverless Music – Orchestrate your workflow with Azure [Part 2 – Logic Apps]

A quick walkthrough on taking the Flow created in Part 1 and upgrading to Azure’s workflow orchestration offering: Logic Apps

Make Serverless Music – Orchestrate your workflow with Azure [Part 1 – Microsoft Flow]

A walkthrough of an example using Microsoft Flow to perform a common backend operation: data validation

Creating an XML <-> JSON Converter in Azure Functions

A walkthrough of creating an Azure Function to convert XML to JSON and vice-versa, including pitfalls and gotchyas of returning XML from Azure Functions

Azure and Alexa, creating conversation with ease

A quick walkthrough on creating an Alexa Skill backed by Azure Functions

Publishing to an Event Grid topic from .Net

Here’s a quick helper class to make publishing to a custom topic in an Event Grid instance a one-line operation.

Locally debugging an Azure Function triggered by Azure Event Grid

Event Grid subscriptions point to an https endpoint. When using Azure Functions as the subscriber, how can you locally debug your events?

Using Azure API Management to prevent Denial of Wallet attacks

While it would be high near impossible to DDoS a solution running on a serverless platform (scaling would just continue to handle all the requests it needed to), somebody still has to pay for the execution. Most (good) serverless implementations use what is often called “micro-billing” whereby you are billed only for each *actual execution* of your code. But, if we think of this nefariously and I send a few thousand requests/second to your endpoints guess what happens. Yup, one hefty bill. This has become known as a Denial of Wallet attack.