[lindydonna]

Have you tried out Azure Functions? It has pretty good features for continuous integration, a CLI where you can run locally, and a really nice monitoring experience. Obviously it's probably not worth migrating an existing project, but it might be useful for future projects. Plus, we have a Serverless Framework plugin.

Here's a talk that walks through some of our features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgB-fs1hwlw&t=18s

Disclosure: I'm a Program Manager on Azure Functions.

[thenewwazoo]

I used Azure Functions (when I was a MSFT employee, in fact), and found it to be unusable. A list of complaints:

* setup is 100% completely clicky-clicky UI driven, which was a huge pain to scale. instantiation of a Function on behalf of a developer for production use was a huge time sink

* it's clearly a thin veneer on Azure Web Services, and the abstractions leak badly in the portal (deployment credentials, for example)

* the web UI breaks completely and mysteriously if you enable authentication

* management of service princi- uh, I mean, Azure AD Applications was weird, and the (internal to MSFT, I suspect) permissions model to the Graph API was a huge barrier to ease of use

* management of NPM packages required me to start a terminal session in the UI and run commands manually, which was a huge turnoff (and had to be repeated ad nauseam with every new Function created)

* the configuration files for the runtime are utterly undocumented, with the sole exception of the bits used to plug Azure inputs/outputs together. this makes automating things exceedingly difficult. I recall there even being a magic value in the topmost config file

* the edit-commit-push-test cycle was VERY slow, with new commits sometimes taking tens of minutes to "appear" in my function

* I never found a way to run it locally, making the previous point that much worse

* log output is very difficult to find, and can live in a few different places. I spent too much time hunting for errors, especially things like syntax errors that make the runtime itself go kaboom. This was the thing that really killed it for me; if I had an error that resulted in anything but a "clean" return, it was torture trying to figure out where I'd missed the paren.

[lindydonna]

Thanks for the detailed feedback! I think you probably used Functions when it was much newer, and I think we’ve actually addressed all of your issues.

- You can create a Function App via ARM/CLI/etc., you can write functions without ever touching the portal. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/funct.... You can also now use Visual Studio to author C# functions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/funct...

- It’s true that Functions is built on App Service, but I see that as an advantage. You get all the great features of Continuous Integration, custom domains, automated deployment, etc.

- Indeed, the portal does not do well when auth is enabled and all routes are protected. The problem is that the portal calls admin APIs that are also protected, so it fails. We now have better error messages for this, and we’re tracking this bug: https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-ux/issues/499

- The Graph API issue is probably not specific to Functions, but it is a bit easier with the Authentication/Authorization feature. Can you provide more detail?

- You can install npm packages at the "root" of your Function and not reinstall them for each Function, just like a normal Node.js app - it walks the directories.

- Our documentation is much better now, and we even have documentation for all bindings in the portal. We also have much better conceptual docs on bindings, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/funct.... We’d welcome any specific feedback on docs that are missing.

- CI should be faster now, it usually takes about 2-3 minutes for commits to show up. It’s fast enough that I’ve demo’d it.

- You can now run locally and debug using the Azure Functions Core Tools (npm i -g azure-functions-core-tools; func init; func host start). See docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/funct.... This is something that our users always praise us for. We support C# debugging with Visual Studio and JavaScript debugging with VSCode.

- Logs definitely weren't great. Initially, they always went to table storage, but the ones you see streaming in the portal get written to disk to enable the realtime portal stream - they are only written to disk when you're in the portal, so they are "sometimes" there. The good news is that we've tightly integrated Application Insights, which means logs are easy to find. It's easy to alert on failed functions. You can see perf and metric data all in one place without log parsing. For a demo, go to the 6 minute mark of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgB-fs1hwlw&t=6m

[lindydonna]

Update: the portal does work if Auth is enabled--the bug was fixed a couple of months ago and we didn't close the issue. See https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-ux/issues/499

[thenewwazoo]

Thanks for such a comprehensive follow-up. It's true that it has been a while, and it really does sound like you've addressed nearly all of the issues I had. (btw, the undocumented file was host.json, which it appears may be better documented now)