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>> Hi, I'm Donavan Brown with another episode of Azure Friday. I'm here with Alex and today we're going to be talking to you about Azure function Proxies. Welcome to the show Alex. >> Thanks for having me on. >> So what do you do here at Microsoft? >> I'm a PM on the Function's team, I own a lot of our API scenarios. >> Okay, cool. So, what does a function Proxy and I why do I care? > > Yeah, so it's basically a Serverless API toolbox. It's running in the functions run time, but that's about as close to functions as it gets. It's basically a bunch of API routing and compositing tools. Kind of a light API management for anybody looking to build an API. >> I got it. So, it's API management without some of the throttling and all that kinda stuff. So, why would I use this over like an App Service because I can just spin up an App Service and put an API in there? >> Yeah, awesome question. So Proxies is serverless. So it means that when your Proxy is running and getting traffic, you're getting billed at the consumption rate, but when it's not running, it's totally free. >> I see, okay. So, yeah, whereas if I was using an App Service as long as that app services running I'm paying for it even if no one is hitting my API. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Got it. So what are you going to show us today? >> So yeah, I'm going to show us the process of building an API if you were to use Proxies. >> Okay. >> There's a couple of really common scenarios that we see lots of API developers hit. The first is they want to build some sort of mock API. And so if you get like a contract to build an API, you want to immediately validate that that's the right thing, not build the whole API and learn that it's the wrong thing. >> Okay. >> Or if you have a mobile team building against your API, you want them to be unblocked as fast as possible. >> Got it, so this would be good for testing scenarios, early development without having to make a huge investment and, Oh my God, we've done this and now all of a sudden it doesn't feel right, it doesn't have the right shape, it doesn't have the right interface. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Okay. So yeah. I'm going to hop right into the portal and walk through that scenario. >> Okay. And so I'm here in a blink function app. This one is called NYTMoviesAPI. So eventually, it's going to display movie reviews but for the meantime, I just want to unblock the mobile team that's building against this API. And so I'm going to add a new Proxy in here. It's in the functions run time, so you have to make a new function app to do it. I'm going to call this Proxy movies, and I'm going to have it live at /movie/title. And you can see here, this route is basically the URL that the Proxy leaves at, and we have variables that we can embed in the route or any of these other overrides. So I'm taking in the title in the route, because it's mock API, there's no backend URL we're just populating this response info. So I'm going to have it returned 200, okay, and then I'm going to give it some simple movie data. And so I happen to have a sample movie review here, and something kind of interesting about this, we have this nice Json editor, but I've embedded the title here into the response in a couple of places. >> Okay. >> And so I'm putting in the display and then a couple of different places in that description. And this is really going to help the team building against this to have something sort of approximating a real API. >> Awesome. >> And if you had this in a list you would have different info in each list item. So I'm going to test this API really quickly, no need to do some sort of crazy deployment. I'm just going to go to this URL for the portal and I'm going to give it just a random movie, it's gonna give me back a mock response for that, which is pretty quick. And this is obviously not matching the movie exactly, we'll fix that later. So that's the sort of thing that as an API developer you'd want to be able to do as fast as possible. >> Is there any way that I can have logic to where if title equals this, then I want you to give a different response or is it pretty much just you're gonna get the same one every single time? >> No, you can just do those variable transforms, that's more of like API management territory. >> Got you. >> So yeah, this is a mock API, so I pretty much immediately want to replace this with a real API. >> Got it. >> I'm a developer now, everybody is built against this mock API. And I'm going to use the actual New York Times movies API. >> Okay. >> I don't know if you know this, but they have a bunch of APIs over there at The New York Times. >> I had no idea. >> And I'm going to show you another more advanced feature of Proxies. We have this awesome portal editor but lots of developers just want to be in code. And so in the portal we have this code editor that we can open up, this used to be Visual Studio online, and now it's just our editor,. >> Okay. >> I mean, it gives us this proxies.json view, of your Proxy. This is going to be the same thing that we show in Visual Studio a little bit later, Visual Studio code. But you can get to it here in the portal without having to load up your whole ID. And so I have this mock API here in the portal and I'm just going to replace it with the API that I had written earlier. And this is going to point to the New York Times API, and it's going to do a couple of other things. It's pretty common when you're building an API that whatever you actually built has some implementation quotes that don't quite match whatever the contract was. And so in this case, the New York Times Movies API once the movie as a query parameter and not in that URL path, and they want me to append an API key. And so I'm doing something really cool in here, I'm actually using an app setting to insert this API key into the Proxy. This is really cool, it's deployed with the function, and it allows me to isolate secrets or any sort of information that I want a platform Administrator to change from my actual logic. >> Okay. >> So like I could check this code into a public report or put it on a public video without exposing my API key to the whole world. >> Perfect. >> So this is automatically saved. So I should be able to go in here with my API, refresh this URL and get back real movie reviews. And there we go. I'm getting back real movie reviews. The developer didn't have to change anything, they didn't have to update a version, they didn't have to change their Schema at all. >> Okay, so to make sure I'm following. So we went in, we mocked out a very quick API. >> Yeah. >> And we understand now what the signature is. It basically has movie and then the title of the movie that I want. And then you wired up almost like a pass through to the actual New York Times. So, I'm still hitting your API, but then you're then going off and sending this information to the New York Times, taking the input, and giving it back to me. What you showed me was that the signature that I use is different than the signature of the New York Times. So I had to massage it a little bit, which I did in that Json in the little snippet of code. Great. And now the people who use my API are actually using the New York Times API. >> Yeah, that's correct. >> Alright, I got it. >> Or they could be using any other back-end. >> Sure, whatever, you just chose to use a New York API at this particular choice. >> Yeah, got it. >> Yeah. >> And what happened to that data, and this is still using Proxy, but what happened to that mock data? Like so this Mock thing now just gets ignored or can I still use it for development? >> Yeah, I just deleted that when I overwrite it and overrode it in the editor. >> Got it, got it. >> But yeah, you could just as easily copy it and have another Proxy. >> And we went to the editor in that other screen, would there have been a way here on this UI for me to have made that change to the API? >> Yeah, absolutely. We have this whole request and response override view. And so you can see my response overwrite here in a visual form. >> Got it, so this is a graphical representation of the Json that you pasteed into the editor. So it's six one we have does another, whatever you feel more comfortable with, I could have done it here or done it there, same end result. >> Yeah. >> Perfect, okay, got it. >> So yeah, I'm going to do one more thing to this API. The last kind of common scenario after you have your API built is to extend it in some way. And usually you want to do that without trying to break anything in production without even touching any of the code that you've already deployed. >> Got it. >> So, I'm going to use Proxies for another really neat scenario, to host a single-page application here in the same URL. And this is really cool especially if you're looking to move out of the whole server deployment. You can have like a really simple web page without even having to spin up an App Service instance and you pay for that every month. So I'm doing the super simply, I'm just proxying to an html file that I have up in Blob storage. And so I'm going to call this Proxy Home, the route template is just slash, and the backend URL is that Blob storage. And this file is actually going to call out to an API on another Function App, but it could just as easily be calling back to a function running in the same function app. So if I go to my root URL, I get a nice little single-page application and it has a very simple API that just gets me Server time, at that other Function App. >> I see. >> So, we could have also done, is you were just describing as I can have this single-page app, so this spot here could actually be calling the movies Proxy that we decided before and show me the list of the residues of whatever I did and I typed in because it'd be a lot better than seeing raw Json, because in that spot I can then go ahead and polish the date and make it look better. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And then because it's a function, I'm only getting paid if and only if someone is actually hitting it not like an App Service I'm paying for it all the time. >> Yeah, and because it's a function you get an awesome free charter, you get a million free executions a month. >> Wow! Okay, so not only do I only pay when someone's hitting it, I only pay if someone's hits it for the millionth and first time. >> Yeah. >> So that I can see this being free for a lot of the APIs I write and we say we're popular enough, to have to be charged for but they're not. >> Yeah. We're more excited that you want your API is popular enough hopefully you can spend a little bit to around that. >> Perfect. Now do you think once I've gotten to the point where I'm doing over a million of these a day, that I would be moving to like API management or would I stay here. When is the signal to me that okay, Donovan you've outgrown using Proxies you need to go and do something more mature. >> Yeah, quick, it's a million a month. >> A million a month not a day, okay. >> But, yeah, I see when you start to need some of those more advanced routing features, and saw some more complicated transforms or if you want to do like rate-limiting. >> Got you. And APIM has like a whole developer on-boarding portal that lots of people love. >> Okay, great. So what else do you have to show us here? Yes, we have a whole local experience for Proxies, and we can run it with the local run time and you can write Proxies in Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio, or just any text editor if you feel so inclined. So, I'm here in Visual Studio code and I have a local function in here. Over on the left I have just a simple JavaScript function inside of this function app, and then I have this Proxies Json file. And here it's populated with just a super-simple Proxy, and this is another mock API and it's replicating the hello serverless example that we load up in a lot of new functions. Something really cool in here, because we're away from the portal, Visual Studio Code has a little bit extra to help us write this Json file. We have this Schema here and so if I hover over any of these pieces of information, I actually get the inline documentation which I think is super cool. And as I start typing in here, and I actually get intellisense of all of the different Proxies features. >> Great. Whenever I see something like this happening in code, my number one question is, what extension did I have to install to get this? Because I'm sure this didn't come out of the boxes, right? >> I think this is the coolest thing about Visual Studio. Any Json with a Schema does this. >> Perfect. And so there's no extension required to get this exact experience. Right. But they actually functions it wasn't extension. Yeah. Okay, great. So what extension do we need to do to make sure that we have both of them. So, any Json with a Schema Visual Studio Code is going to give us this amazing experience, but to get that Azure functions down here in my activity here I'm sure I hadn't install an extension. >> Yeah there's an Azure function extension that isn't just an extension of the Azure CLI. >> Perfect. >> And I actually like that you can use the Azure CLI outside of Visual Studio Code. So I'm actually going to run this Proxy locally. I like to use the extension just in PowerShell. I like to not get so cramped inside of that Visual Studio. >> Understood. >> So I'm going to do Func Host Start, and this is going to scan that local function and it's going to show me both my function, my Proxy and that Json function. >> I mean an interesting point here, as far as the function runtime is concerned, Proxies are just functions with a precompiled block-like box. It doesn't know that it's got all that nice good Proxies bits in it. And so it just shows me two HTTP triggered functions. In the portal we separate them out for you but as far as you're concerned they're just functions with R code in them. And so it gives me these two APIs I'm and going to use Postman here locally to test that Proxy. >> Got it. >> And so I have it pointed at Localhost and I have a query parameter for my name, which is Proxies, and it's going to tell me hello Proxies, awesome. And I can see over here in the terminal, it's giving me logs that it executed that function. >> Perfect. >> So now I want to point this Proxy at a local function, just the same way that I did in the portal to make this API now more live. >> Okay. >> And something that's really cool when you're developing locally, you obviously don't have the same URL for your Local Functions as your Cloud Function. >> Right. >> So we have a Local Host keyword that lets you point at Local Functions. And it's really neat. In the backend it's actually directly pointing the request at the local function. It's not going back to the front end, it's not going back to the Internet, it's taking that HTTP request and sending it straight to the function. >> Okay. >> So it's way faster than going to a separate function app or like a separate instance somewhere else. >> Alright, perfect. So how am I going to change this one? I'm probably jumping ahead so, great local development but eventually I'm going to want to put this back up in Azure. You are going show us the modifications necessary to take this local thing and then put it back in Azure? >> No, I'm just going to show you running it locally. >> I got it. >> But there is a whole deployment flow inside of the CLI and there's a bunch of different videos of other showing the deployment. >> We'll make sure that those are in the notes for the show, because we want to make sure, this is always exciting to work on, work locally and be able to develop much quicker than having to always make the changes in the portal. But we always have to make sure that once we're done we got to get it back into the portal somewhere. >> Yeah. >> And I wouldn't want to have to duplicate my work. There has to be a deployment mechanism for that. >> One important note, nothing changes when you add Proxies. It's the same as deploying any other function to Azure. >> Okay. >> So yeah, when I made this change, the function runtime, just like it runs in the cloud, it locally, it's scanning for new code changes. >> Okay. >> And so I didn't have to stop and start the runtime to my new logic. And so if I go into Postman and call that exact same API, it should now send to the JavaScript and the JavaScript gives a little bit of a different response. JavaScript it's a little bit more colloquial. So yeah, that's everything I have to show today about Proxies. Thank you so much, so we're learning all about Azure function Proxies here on Azure Friday.