Manage Connections with Azure Functions

Best Practices

Use the following best practices to properly manage connections between Azure Functions and Atlas:

• Define the client to the MongoDB server outside the Run method of your Azure function handler.

  Don't define a new MongoClient object each time you invoke your function. Doing so causes the driver to create a new database connection with each function call. This can be expensive and can result in your application exceeding database connection limits. When you define a new MongoClient, you should:

  1. Create the MongoClient object once.

  2. Store the object so your function can reuse the MongoClient across function invocations.

  The Connection Example reuses existing database connections to speed up communication with the database and keep connection counts to the database at a reasonable level with respect to application traffic.

• Restrict network access to your Atlas cluster from your Azure Functions.

  Connect to your Atlas cluster over private networking using a Network Peering connection between your Atlas cluster and your Azure Functions, or, alternatively, a private endpoint, so that you can allow only private IP addresses from your IP access list.

  Note

  This configuration requires an Azure Functions Premium Plan with a Virtual Network (VNet) Integration configured.

  If you don't use private networking, consider connecting to your Atlas cluster using a NAT gateway. Review outbound IP address changes and strategies for ensuring static outbound IP addresses.

• Set maxIdleTimeMS to 60000 to automatically close your connections after 1 minute of idle time. Tuning your maxIdleTimeMS can help reduce the occurrence of timeout errors from your serverless functions.

Connection Example

The Azure Functions Example in the mongodb-developer repository contains example code that shows how to work with the MongoDB C# driver and Azure Functions using Atlas clusters.

To learn more about using Azure Functions with Visual Studio Code, see Quickstart: Create a C# function in Azure using Visual Studio Code

To learn more about using Azure Functions with Visual Studio, see Quickstart: Create your first C# function in Azure using Visual Studio.