AUTOMATE THE MANAGEMENT OF VIRTUAL MACHINES AND CLOUD RESOURCES USING AZURE FUNCTIONS

This paper presents a practical approach to automating the management of virtual machines in Microsoft Azure using the serverless platform Azure Functions and the Azure Key Vault service for secure secret storage. The developed solution exposes HTTP-triggered functions that start and stop virtual machines in Azure, using the Azure Resource Manager SDK for .NET for resource access. Authentication data is stored in Azure Key Vault and accessed through managed identities, which eliminates credentials from the application code and configuration files. The proposed approach is implemented using the isolated worker model for C# Azure Functions, providing decoupling between the .NET runtime version and the Azure Functions host.