Severless Hackathon

Instructor-led Training

Course Description

This Hack enables attendees to quickly build and deploy Azure Serverless solutions that are comprised of cutting-edge compute services like Functions, Logic Apps, Event Grid, Service Bus, Event Hubs and Cosmos DB.  

This Hack simulates a real-world scenario where an ice cream company wants to use Platform as a Service (PaaS) to build and release an API to integrate into their distributor’s application.  

During the “hacking” attendees will focus on: 

  1. Building serverless functions, web APIs, and CI/CD pipeline to support them
  2. Implementing Serverless technologies to integrate line-of-business app workflows, process user/data telemetry and create business KPI-aligned reports. 

By the end of the Hack, attendees will have built out a technical solution that is a full serverless solution that can create workflows between systems and handle events, files, and data ingestion. 

 

About this Course

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 
 

3 Days

To be successful and get the most out of this Hack, it is highly recommended that participants have earlier experience with API integration and a deep understanding of the language they chose to work in. Participants who are familiar with the technologies listed will be able to advance more quickly. A working knowledge of DevOps fundamentals is useful. 

Required knowledge of Azure fundamentals.
 

Advanced

Azure

  • Target Audience: 
    • Microsoft – CSE, CSA, GBB, ATT, SE, TPM
    • Customer – App Developers 
  • Target verticals: Cross-Industry 
  • Customer profile: Examples:
    • Modern Application Development – customers looking to build cloud native applications and use Platform as a Service (PaaS) services on Azure to remove the overhead of infrastructure management and reduce the time to market for applications. High focus on rapid application developed.
    • Event Driven Distributed Architecture – customers looking to architected solution that rely on messaging services for communication between systems and services and focus on async processing for effective scaling and management.  
 
  • 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 
  • Build Azure cloud native event driven applications (mid-tier and backend) using Azure Serverless technologies  
  • Increase awareness on building scalable, event-driven applications with messaging services for asynchronous communication 
  • Remove infrastructure related tasks and considerations from developers to focus on rapid application development 
  • Help make decisions on when to use and how to choose Azure Services to achieve the business outcomes  
  • Learn best practices for building CI/CD for Serverless and processing events at scale 
 

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