OpenHack – Serverless (OHSL)

Challenge 1: Environment Configuration

In this challenge, you will get your development environment ready to develop serverless applications.

Learning objectives:

• Install the required software and pre-requisites to build and test the Azure Functions Locally

Challenge 2: Create your first serverless function & workflow

In this challenge, you will create and deploy your first Azure Function and Logic App.

Learning objectives:

• Create your first Functions Web API locally and deploy to the Azure cloud
• Get familiar with the Azure Portal to create resources required to host your APIs
• Build your first Logic Apps workflow on the portal directly

Challenge 3: Expand and build a full set of APIs to support business needs

In this challenge, you will build an API to persist and retrieve data from a data store and configure a CI/CD pipeline.

Learning objectives:

• Gain experience building multiple Web APIs that accept and output a different type of data in JSON
• Experience the local and cloud testing of the APIs by making calls from your local machine
• Build a Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration (CI/CD) pipeline from source control

Challenge 4: Deploy a management layer for APIs to monitor and track your APIs

In this challenge, you will enable monitoring of the APIs, as well as devise an API management strategy.

Learning objectives:

• Learn how you can capture and report telemetry about the APIs that are hosted on the cloud
• Experience building an API management layer to manage the APIs and expose it through a common base endpoint

Challenge 5: Build a workflow process

In this challenge, you will build a business process workflow which integrates with a CRM system.

Learning objectives:

• Gain experience using a graphical user interface editor to build Workflows using Logic Apps
• Experience the drag and drop connectors to bring Line of Business apps to create a flow and notify contacts via emails

Challenge 6: Process large amount of unstructured data

In this challenge, you will process files in a batch process and persist to a data store

Learning objectives:

• Build solutions to process batch files coming into a storage account
• Learn how to parse the flat files and store them on a database (structured or unstructured)

Challenge 7: Process large amount of incoming events

In this challenge, you will process batches of messages from Event Hub and persist in a data store. You will also extend the monitoring approach created earlier to track the number of running Azure Function instances.

Learning objectives:

• Learn how to extend the API’s to parse the JSON sales events and store them in a backend data store
• Demonstrate how you tracked the number of instances that your Azure Functions scaled up to with App Insights

Challenge 8: Messaging Patterns and Virtual Network Integration

In this challenge, you will configure a messaging solution capability of filtering messages, as well as using virtual network integration to save data to a private data store.

Learning objectives:

• Learn how to use publisher/subscriber messaging patterns with filtering rules to enable subscribers to process specific messages
• Build a serverless solution capable of working with Azure resources which utilize virtual network access restrictions

Challenge 9: Alerting based on user sentiments

In this challenge, you will integrate machine learning capabilities into the current solution to detect and alert on user sentiment.

Learning objectives:

• Leveraging sentiment analysis to assess the user sentiments based on feedback
• Review the sentiments in batch and alert the responsible contacts what sentiment score products have been receiving

Challenge 10: Putting it all together

In this challenge, you will create a report which summarizes key business metrics derived from the full solution.

Learning objectives:

• Bring all things together and demonstrate how things flow end to end
• Report insights on how the products are behaving

Technical Scenarios

Building API’s with Serverless event processing, workflows and integration with different systems, streaming and analytics, VNET integration and batch processing of high column data.

• Enterprise Integration – bring various line of business systems and applications together to orchestrate the process without having to provision large infrastructure footprint
• DevOps Practice – building CI and CD for the services developed to help with best practice for source control for code management
• Scaling & Logging – understanding the scaling aspect of services when you have a spike in events and visualization of application insights to gather business data

FAQs

Q: Should customers who are using FaaS still attend this OpenHack?

• A: Yes, because the content highlights end to end application cycle with focus on CI/CD, Scaling, DR and VNet requirements.

Q: Is there a suggested flow of OpenHacks which an attendee should attend first, before going to yours?

• A: No. See Prerequisites, above.