2 Using Azure: Azure Functions and image processing

Now that you have an idea of why Azure is so popular and why it’s a great choice for computing infrastructures, let’s dive into a practical example of using Azure to solve a real problem of storing images from emails and compressing them. We’ll keep it simple, but that doesn’t mean it will lack in power and application options.

Relating knowledge to examples and implementations that are as close to real world as possible is the best way to learn a technical topic, and cloud computing with Azure is no exception. Let’s build an application that follows just that principle.

2.1 Understanding the problem

Imagine you’re working for a company that sells photography and imaging services. One of the products is a service that lets users send their images via email for an online photo album. The online albums are growing in size as images are getting bigger and bigger with modern camera technology. This in turn means that the website showing the images in the photo albums is getting slower and slower, as images get larger and more of them need to load onto the website.

2.2 Creating the architecture

2.2.1 What is a resource group?

2.2.2 Creating a resource group

2.2.3 Azure Blob Storage: The basics

2.2.4 Creating a storage account

2.2.5 Storage account: Networking

2.2.6 Storage account: Data protection

2.2.7 Creating a storage container

2.2.8 What is an Azure Logic App?

2.2.9 Creating a Logic App

2.2.10 Logic App riggers and connectors

2.2.11 Configuring a Logic App connector

2.2.12 Logic App operation: Storing data from email to Blob Storage

2.2.13 Testing the Logic App workflow

2.2.14 What is an Azure Function?