Business problem

In general, every organization will definitely be using various applications hosted in multiple platforms across different data centers (either cloud or on-premises). Often, there will be requirements where the data from one application needs to be fed to another system. Usually, Excel spreadsheets (or in some cases, JSON or XML files) are used for exporting data from one application and importing it into another application.

You might think that exporting an Excel file from one application to another would be an easy job, but if there are many applications that need to feed data to other applications, and on a weekly/monthly basis, then it would become very tedious and there is lot of scope for manual error. So, obviously the solution is to automate the process to the highest possible extent. 

In this chapter, we will learn how to develop a durable solution based on serverless architecture using Durable Functions. If you have already read Chapter 7, Developing Reliable Serverless Applications Using Durable Functions, then you might have some basic knowledge of what Durable Functions are and how they work. In Chapter 7, Developing Reliable Serverless Applications Using Durable Functions, we implemented the solution from the portal. However, in this chapter, we will implement a mini-project using Visual Studio 2017 (preferably 15.5 or higher).

Before we start developing the project, let's try to understand the new serverless way of implementing the solution.