Azure Functions

Lithops with Azure Functions as serverless compute backend.

Note that currently Azure functions supports Python 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9. So you must use one of these versions in your client machine.

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_storage:
      storage_account_name: <STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME>
      storage_account_key: <STORAGE_ACCOUNT_KEY>

  azure_functions:
      location: <CONSUMPTION_PLAN_LOCATION>
      resource_group: <RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME>

Summary of configuration keys for Azure

Azure

Group	Key	Default	Mandatory	Additional info
azure_storage	storage_account_name		yes	The name generated in the step 5 of the installation
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		yes	Name of the resource group used in the step 5 of the installation.
azure_functions	location		yes	The location of the consumption plan for the runtime. Use az functionapp list-consumption-locations to view the available locations.
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 test -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