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> You open vscode, install the Azure Functions extensions, walk through the wizard to pick your programming language and write the code. Then create and deploy it from vscode without ever leaving your IDE.

You are talking about something entirely different. Provisioning a function app is not the same as deploying the function app. How easy it is to upload a zip is immaterial to the discussion.

mawax 346 days ago

The vscode extension can both provisions the resource as well as deploy it.

Edit: And yes, it will create every resource it needs if you want to, except for the subscription.

> The vscode extension can both provisions the resource as well as deploy it.

On top of having to have an Azure subscription, you need to provision:

- a resource group

- a service plan

- a function app

You do not get to skip those with azure.

And by the way, the only time anyone uses vscode to deploy an app, or even visual studio, is to work on personal projects or sandbox environments. Even so, you use the IDE to pick existing resources to deploy to.

You're really trying, aren't you :-)

All of this can easily be automated/cloned if it is something you do often. An RG is a collection of (hopefully) related resources. Plans and the App are provisioned together in the web UI wizard if that's the route you take.

> You're really trying, aren't you :-)

I'm trying to educate you on the topic, but you seem to offer resistance.

I mean, I haven't even mentioned the fact that in order to be able to provision an azure function you are also forced to provision a storage account. As if the absurdity of the whole plan concept wasn't enough.

> All of this can easily be automated/cloned if it is something you do often.

Irrelevant. It's completely besides the point how you can automate deploying all those resources.

The whole point is that Azure follows an absurdly convoluted model that leaks forces users to manage many layers of low-level infrastructure details even when using services that supposedly follow serverless computing models. I mean, why on earth would anyone have to provision a storage account to be able to deploy an Azure Function? Absurd.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/func...

I've provisioned many Azure Functions apps; there's nothing you can educate me on, here.

Why do you care about a storage account so much?

Since you didn't know about the [Flex] Consumption plan, there's your education.

And as to why they require a storage account:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/stor...

Wallah, education!

snupples 346 days ago

Which is exactly the opposite of how to effectively manage applications, code, and change at any scale beyond a home project.

jiggawatts 346 days ago

One thing I noticed about all of the public clouds is an insistence by small-scale users to avoid the user-friendly interface and go straight to the high scale templating or provisioning APIs because of a perception that that’s “more proper”.

You won’t get any benefits until you have dozens of instances of the same(ish) thing, and maybe not even then!

Especially in the dev stage it is perfectly fine to use the wizards in VS or VS Code.

The newer tooling around Aspire.NET and “azd up” makes this into true IaC with little effort.

Don’t overthink things!

PS: As a case in point I saw an entire team get bogged down for months trying to provision something through raw API calls that had ready-to-run script snippets in the docs and a Portal wizard that would have taken that team all of five minutes to click through… If they’re very slow with a mouse.

mawax 346 days ago

That was not the point. Parent was complaining how complicated provisioning and deploying through the Azure portal was.

At scale you'd IaC such as Bicep.

> That was not the point. Parent was complaining how complicated provisioning and deploying through the Azure portal was.

No, I wasn't. I was pointing out the fact that Azure follows an absurd, brain-dead model of what the cloud is, which needlessly and arbutrarily imposes layers of complexity without any reason.

Case in point: the concept of a service plan. It's straight up stupid to have a so-called cloud provider force customers to manage how many instances packing X RAM and Y vCPUs you need to have to run a function-as-a-service app, and then have to manage how that is shared with app services and other function apps.

Think about the backlash that AWS would experience if they somehow decided to force users to allocate EC2 instances to run lambda functions, and on top of that create another type of resource to group together lambdas to run on each EC2 instance.

To let the absurdity of that sink in, it's far easier, simpler, and much cheaper to just provision virtual private servers on a small cloud provider, stitch them together with a container orchestration service, and just deploy apps in there.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/functions/...

> Case in point: the concept of a service plan. It's straight up stupid to have a so-called cloud provider force customers to manage how many instances packing X RAM and Y vCPUs you need to have to run a function-as-a-service app, and then have to manage how that is shared with app services and other function apps.

You're not forced to, you can use a consumption plan.

> You're not forced to, you can use a consumption plan.

Pray tell, what do you think is relevant in citing how many plans you can pick and choose from to just run a simple function? I mean, are you trying to argue that instead of one type of plan, you have to choose another type of plan?

The consumption plan is the default plan, so technically you don't have to choose anything, just go with the defaults.

But it disproves your point that you're "forced" to have an app service plan.

At this point you're simply arguing to argue after having been shown to be incorrect multiple times. Good luck.