Creating Your First Azure PowerShell Function App

Originally published at https://adamtheautomator.com on October 7, 2020.

You may have already heard the term serverless-computing. Many cloud service providers offer this service, including Microsoft. With Microsoft’s Azure Functions, you can create function apps that support many languages, including Azure PowerShell.

Suppose you want to automate issuing software licenses to customers. When the customer paid, your website sends an HTTP request to your Azure Function App. The app then validates payment and automatically sends the license to the customer’s email address.

That’s just one scenario where an Azure Function App can be used. There are more usage scenarios from e-commerce to monitoring and reporting where Azure Function Apps can fit in.

In this article, you will learn how to create an Azure PowerShell Function App, develop, test, and execute the code. You’ll also get the chance to build a mini-project where you’ll create a function for getting the status of Azure VMs and display the result on the web.

Prerequisites

There are several ways to create an Azure PowerShell Function App, and in this article, you will learn the most basic way with the least requirements.

To follow along with the instructions, you need to meet these requirements below.

• You must have a valid Azure account with an active subscription. If you don’t have one yet, you can create an account for free.
• If you do the mini-project at the end of this article, you will need one or more Azure Virtual Machines ( or ). Note that you will not use these virtual machines. They only need to exist to report their status using the Azure PowerShell Function App that you will be creating.

Creating the Azure PowerShell Function App

As you will learn in this article, creating a new Azure Function app is quick and easy as long as you are familiar with the process. The high-level steps to create a simple function app consists of:

• Creating a new Azure Resource group where the function app will be contained.
• Creating a new general-purpose Azure Storage account.
• Creating a new Function app.
• Creating a new function.