Real-time serverless applications with the SignalR Service bindings in Azure Functions

Since our public preview announcement at Microsoft Ignite 2018, every month thousands of developers worldwide have leveraged the Azure SignalR Service bindings for Azure Functions to add real-time capabilities to their serverless applications. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of these bindings in all global regions where Azure SignalR Service is available!

SignalR Service is a fully managed Azure service that simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to applications over HTTP. This real-time functionality allows the service to push messages and content updates to connected clients using technologies such as WebSocket. As a result, clients are updated without the need to poll the server or submit new HTTP requests for updates.

Azure Functions provides a productive programming model based on triggers and bindings for accelerated development and serverless hosting of event-driven applications. It enables developers to build apps using the programming languages and tools of their choice, with an end-to-end developer experience that spans from building and debugging locally, to deploying and monitoring in the cloud. Combining Azure SignalR Service with Azure Functions using these bindings, you can easily push updates to the UI of your applications with just a few lines of code. The source of those updates can be data coming from different Azure services, or any service able to communicate over HTTP, thanks to the triggers supported in Azure Functions that will start the execution of a script responding to an event.

A common scenario worth mentioning is updating the UI of an application based on modifications made on the database. Using a combination of Cosmos DB change feed, Azure Functions, and SignalR Service, you can automate these UI updates in real-time with just a few lines of code for registering the client that will receive those updates and pushing the updates themselves. This fully managed experience is a great fit for event-driven scenarios and enables the creation of serverless backends and applications with real-time capabilities, reducing development time and operations overhead.

Using the Azure SignalR Service bindings for Azure Functions you will be able to:

◈ Use SignalR Service without dependency on any application server for a fully managed, serverless experience.

◈ Build serverless real-time applications using all Azure Functions generally available languages: JavaScript, C#, and Java.

◈ Leverage the SignalR Service bindings with all event triggers supported by Azure Functions to push messages to connected clients in real-time.

◈ Use App Service Authentication with SignalR Service and Azure Functions for improved security and out-of-the-box, fully managed authentication.