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Connect to eventing and messaging services from Azure Functions

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As a cloud computing service, Azure Functions is frequently used to move data between various Azure services. To make it easier for you to connect your code to other services, Functions implements a set of binding extensions to connect to these services. To learn more, see Azure Functions triggers and bindings concepts.

By definition, Azure Functions executions are stateless. If you need to connect your code to services in a more stateful way, consider instead using Durable Functions or Azure Logic Apps.

Triggers and bindings are provided to consuming and emitting data easier. There may be cases where you need more control over the service connection, or you just feel more comfortable using a client library provided by a service SDK. In those cases, you can use a client instance from the SDK in your function execution to access the service as you normally would. When using a client directly, you need to pay attention to the effect of scale and performance on client connections. To learn more, see the guidance on using static clients.

You can't obtain the client instance used by a service binding from your function execution.

The rest of this article provides specific guidance for integrating your code with the specific Azure services supported by Functions.

Event Grid

Event Grid is an Azure service that sends HTTP requests to notify you about events that happen in publishers. A publisher is the service or resource that originates the event. For example, an Azure blob storage account is a publisher, and a blob upload or deletion is an event. Some Azure services have built-in support for publishing events to Event Grid.

Event handlers receive and process events. Azure Functions is one of several Azure services that have built-in support for handling Event Grid events. Functions provides an Event Grid trigger, which invokes a function when an event is received from Event Grid. A similar output binding can be used to send events from your function to an Event Grid custom topic.

You can also use an HTTP trigger to handle Event Grid Events. To learn more, see Receive events to an HTTP endpoint. We recommend using the Event Grid trigger over HTTP trigger.

Azure Functions provides built-in integration with Azure Event Grid by using triggers and bindings.

To learn how to configure and locally evaluate your Event Grid trigger and bindings, see How to work with Event Grid triggers and bindings in Azure Functions

For more information about Event Grid trigger and output binding definitions and examples, see one of the following reference articles:

Next steps

To learn more about Event Grid with Functions, see the following articles: