On January 10th of 2017 I gave two talks at the Webscale Architecture NL meetup group in Utrecht.

Here are the slides for the people who were there and want to revisit the covered topics.

During the last days of December I was pleasing my internal need for solving puzzles and tricky tasks by going through Advent of Code 2016 challenge.

In my previous post about Event Store read complexity I described how the growth of reads from the event database might be quadratic in respect to amount of events per aggregate.

Here’s a programming puzzle. Given 2D matrix of 0’s and 1’s, find the number of islands. A group of connected 1’s forms an island. For example, the below matrix contains 5 islands

Azure Functions are the Function-as-a-Service offering from Microsoft Azure cloud. Basically, an Azure Function is a piece of code which gets executed by Azure every time an event of some kind happens. The environment manages deployment, event triggers and scaling for you. This approach is often reffered as Serverless.

So you are a C# developer. And you need to read the code and understand its structure. Maybe you’ve just joined the project, or it’s your own code you wrote 1 year ago. In any case, reading code is hard.

On May 8th 2017 I gave a talk at the .NET Development Nederland group in Amsterdam.

Here are the slides for the people who were there and want to revisit the covered topics.

Azure Event Hubs is a log-based messaging system-as-a-service in Azure cloud. It’s designed to be able to handle huge amount of data, and naturally supports multiple consumers.

Starting today, this blog has switched to HTTPS secure protocol:

While there’s not that much to secure on my blog, HTTPS is still considered to be a good practice for any site in 2017. One of the benefits that we can get from it is the usage of HTTP/2 protocol:

One of the ways we use Azure Application Insights is tracking custom application-specific events. For instance, every time a data point from an IoT device comes in, we log an AppInsights event. Then we are able to aggregate the data and plot charts to derive trends and detect possible anomalies.

Updated results are available at Azure Functions Get More Scalable and Elastic.

Automatic elastic scaling is a built-in feature of Serverless computing paradigm. One doesn’t have to provision servers anymore, they just need to write code that will be provisioned on as many servers as needed based on the actual load. That’s the theory.

Update: I missed the elephant in the room. There actually exists a specialized trigger for Event Grid binding. In the portal, just select Experimental in Scenario drop down while creating the function. In precompiled functions, reference Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Extensions.EventGrid NuGet package.

On November 8th 2017 I gave a talk about developing Azure Functions in F# at FSharping meetup in Prague.

I really enjoyed giving this talk: the audience was great and asked awesome questions. One more prove that F# community is so welcoming and energizing!

This post is giving a start to F# Advent Calendar in English 2017. Please follow the calendar for all the great posts to come.

Azure Functions is a “serverless” cloud offering from Microsoft. It allows you to run your custom code as response to events in the cloud. Functions are very easy to start with; and you only pay per execution - with free allowance sufficient for any proof-of-concept, hobby project or even low-usage production loads. And when you need more, Azure will scale your project up automatically.

Back in August this year, I’ve posted Azure Functions: Are They Really Infinitely Scalable and Elastic? with two experiments about Azure Function App auto scaling. I ran a simple CPU-bound function based on Bcrypt hashing, and measured how well Azure was running my Function under load.