Azure Functions

Lithops with Azure Functions as serverless compute backend.

Installation

1. Install Microsoft Azure backend dependencies:

python3 -m pip install lithops[azure]

2. Install Azure CLI

3. Install the Azure Functions core tools

4. Sign in with the Azure CLI:

az login

5. Create a Resource Group and a Storage Account:

   Option 1:

   1. Access to the Azure portal Resource Groups and create a new Resource group named LithopsResourceGroup (or similar) in your preferred region. If you already have a resource group, omit this step.

   2. Access to the Azure portal Storage Accounts and create a new Storage Account with a unique name, for example: lithops0sa25s1. If you already have a storage account, omit this step.

   Option 2:

   1. Create a Resource Group in a specific location. If you already have a resource group, omit this step.

   az group create --name LithopsResourceGroup --location westeurope
   

   2. Create a Storage Account with a unique name. If you already have a storage account, omit this step.

   storage_account_name=lithops$(openssl rand -hex 3)
   echo $storage_account_name
   az storage account create --name $storage_account_name --location westeurope \
       --resource-group LithopsResourceGroup --sku Standard_LRS
   

Configuration

1. Access to the Storage Account

2. In the left menu, under the Security + networking section, click on Access Keys and copy the Key 1

3. Edit your lithops config and add the following keys:

  lithops:
      backend : azure_functions

  azure:
      resource_group: <RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME>
      region: <LOCATION>

  azure_storage:
      storage_account_name: <STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME>
      storage_account_key: <STORAGE_ACCOUNT_KEY>

Summary of configuration keys for Azure

Azure

Group	Key	Default	Mandatory	Additional info
azure	resource_group		yes	Name of a resource group, for example: LithopsResourceGroup
azure	region		yes	Location of the resource group, for example: westeurope, westus2, etc
azure	subscription_id		no	Subscription ID from your account. Find it here

Azure Storage

Group	Key	Default	Mandatory	Additional info
azure_storage	storage_account_name		yes	Storage account name. The name generated in the step 5 of the installation if you followed these instructions
azure_storage	storage_account_key		yes	An Account Key, found in Storage Accounts > account_name > Security + networking > Access Keys

Azure Functions

Group	Key	Default	Mandatory	Additional info
azure_functions	resource_group		no	Name of a resource group, for example: LithopsResourceGroup. Lithops will use the resource_group set under the azure section if it is not set here
azure_functions	region		no	The location of the consumption plan for the runtime. Use az functionapp list-consumption-locations to view the available locations. For example: westeurope, westus2, etc. Lithops will use the region set under the azure section if it is not set here
azure_functions	max_workers	1000	no	Max number of parallel workers. Altough Azure limits the number of workrs to 200, it is convenient to keep this value high
azure_functions	worker_processes	1	no	Number of Lithops processes within a given worker. This can be used to parallelize function activations within a worker
azure_functions	runtime		no	Runtime name already deployed in the service
azure_functions	runtime_timeout	300	no	Runtime timeout in seconds. Default 5 minutes
azure_functions	trigger	pub/sub	no	One of ‘https’ or ‘pub/sub’
azure_functions	invoke_pool_threads	100	no	Number of concurrent threads used for invocation

Test Lithops

Once you have your compute and storage backends configured, you can run a hello world function with:

lithops hello -b azure_functions -s azure_storage

Viewing the execution logs

You can view the function executions logs in your local machine using the lithops client:

lithops logs poll