It's time now to talk about one of my favorite topics which is surplus computing and a welcome addition
to the Microsoft certifications.
For one what is surplus computing.
Well it's an answer too many people don't want to spend all their time managing infrastructure managing
servers all those things they want to spend their time building great applications and service computing
essentially allows us to do.
That's the abstraction of servers infrastructure and operating systems and just takes that whole pain
away completely for you.
The way it works is it provides you with fully managed services and you'll see the major three that
Azure provides you only pay for what you use it's very very cost effective very easy to scale as well
because you're only paying when you use those functions or those logic apps or the event grid as you'll
see coming up.
And finally it's the ability to stitch together applications and services seamlessly is what makes it
so so powerful and so just a great great service in general but something to keep in mind there is a
server running somewhere.
Ultimately you write the code or you create the logic app or you work with event grid.
But you know Microsoft has to execute that somewhere it's going to take that service that you've written
and run it on some compute somewhere.
Now there's three major computing services that you heard me kind of mentioned as a function so these
allow you to write different pieces of code and a lot of the common programming languages that get executed
somewhere logic apps which essentially are workflow engines more of an orchestration type activity more
of you know if this then that type option if you've seen that on the Internet and then eventually it
is just kind of you know we have multiple triggers multiple events going on how do we you know react
to these events and fire off you know the appropriate services in response all three of these work really
really well together.
If we start with Azure functions though a number of key features for one supports the following programming
languages see shop after shop javascript and Java is now in previous he may not get asked that on the
exam but just see you know for the future paper use pricing is a key feature of all service functions
really but in particular for Azure functions is a great thing and it can be used in two ways one as
part of a consumption plan or an app service plan.
So you know an app service plan as you'll learn about a few covering app services you know is where
you can put web apps and other apps on the same compute infrastructure that you have a plan for so you
can combine your Azure functions that so instead of you know going paper use and the consumption plan
you can just use them as part of your app service plan itself and more on that later on.
It doesn't integrated security with major Oh providers Azure A.D. Facebook et and you can code in the
portal or deploy via your standard dev ops tools.
Now logic apps on the flip side a little bit different.
They're essentially a workflow engine.
You know they used to orchestrate and stitch together functions and services just like regular orchestrations
tools if you've used service now orchestrator or VM y orchestrator you'll probably be quite familiar
with things like this weaving systems that are orchestrated.
If you've used that in the Windows world it's the ability to visualize design build automate.
So think of that a little bit different as your functions is all about taking out code put putting that
together and maybe connecting it to other systems making calls et cetera.
But we rewrite the whole code out logic apps is more about this visual orchestration engine that you
have there and supports a lot of different services not just Microsoft services as you'll see in the
demos.
In addition there's some key constructs to understand you.
You have the concept of triggers and actions and you'll see this throughout event grid as well.
The concept is you know we have a trigger something that happens that we want to react to and then that
fires off the actions.
I think about this whenever you do in logic apps what do I care about that happens and then do I want
to send an email.
Do I want to send a rest call.
Do I want to you know start a function.
Do I want to connect to Dropbox or some other service out there.
That's the general concept with logic apps.