Microsoft Azure – New Features in Azure Functions

In this article we will learn about the all-new and improved Azure Functions experience. In this article, we will look into the new preview for the Azure Functions experience. When you come to the Azure Functions UI, this is something that you should already be familiar with, but Azure has this new banner that will take you to the preview experience. 

Once you click in, you will notice that this is very consistent with the rest of Azure and Azure have done this because there’s been a couple of things that kind of have come together to allow you to do this:

1. Azure has been working with the Functions team to expose all of the function runtime APIs through Azure Resource Manager.
2. And azure has been working with the core Portal team to get you all the functionality that you need to be able to render this useful UI.

Now, you can do things like, for example, take advantage of the Azure Resource Graph to have higher performance and better caching and basically create a better experience. So, the first thing that you will notice is that you have the new item that basically groups all of the functions-related functionality. 

And you click into functions list. You can dive into your specific function and get into the code editor. And you can also switch over to the specific files that you want to modify. 

Azure has this new integration view that basically gives you a graphical representation of your function, which makes it very clear to see what is the trigger of your function, what are the inputs coming in, outputs coming in. And as you will see, you can also edit this on the fly.

 Next is Azure’s monitoring experience. This hasn’t changed from what Azure has today in production. But it’s something that Azure will be working on between preview and GA timeframe. 

And then you have your function keys that are also scoped down to the specific function that you are looking at. This is important because Azure has function keys that are scoped to the function and to the function app, so this makes it very clear what level you’re working on. If you want to go back to your specific function, you can see that you have the app-level keys.

And also in overview, you get metrics that are specific to your function app. So, you get to see that holistic view as opposed to the individual function.