Serverless

Social activities planned for the weekend all vaporized for a variety of reasons. Instead, how I spent much of my time was building an API into Bing Chat so that I could use it from my PHP application. I couldn't do this directly as I needed to host a NodeJS library to act as a proxy. So I elected to deploy a serverless function app in Azure to fill the gap.

As an IT Professional I've advocated for serverless solutions plenty of times as Cloud becomes a more routine part of organisation's infrastructure landscape. There is much to like about the concept of code that's only running when you need it, that will spin up in milliseconds any time you want it. But despite having a reasonable understanding of how that works under the hood, I've never actually deployed serverless code myself. So there was an element of magic that lingered behind the curtain.

Building and deploying a serverless API only took a few hours, and that included setting up an Azure account and installing Visual Studio Code plugins. The only real problem I had was with a version of Node that was too high. I called my API a few times from my PHP application and it worked. Such a mundane experience, but it felt like I was finally over the threshold and ready to call myself a Cloud expert.

Away from my computer, no one seemed to care that there was a piece of code in a database somewhere, but not hosted until it was called into action whenever it was needed. I went for a walk around the neighbourhood, enjoying the golden, sunny light knowing nearly everyone I was passing had never deployed serverless to the cloud.