Send a daily Politico Playbooks' audio feed to your email

Some years ago, Politico.eu has decided to stop providing an audio feed of their Brussels Playbook to various podcasting apps. What they still provide is ML-and-AWS-powered Text-To-Speech translation (as of Q2/2020).

As a consequence, because of a large inconvenience, I wrote this Azure Function which extract the first article from https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/brussels-playbook/ and https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/ (aka the latest playbook), and then extracts Amazon Polly audio files from them. Then, AWS audio feed URLs are being forwarded to my email account....on the demand, based on HTTP request to Azure function endpoint.

How to setup it up for yourself?

Requirements:

• Azure Cloud account
• Azure CLI
• Azure Function CLI https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-core-tools
• Azure Storage resource
• Azure Function resource - will be created using Az CLI
• Sendgrid API key (free for 100 emails/day)

1. Fork this repo
2. In __init__.py adjust send_us_playbook_url parameters for your emails, and sendgrid api key. 2.2. Generate Sendgrid key if you need it (you will, if using sendgrid SaaS)
3. Setup azure account

az login
az group create --location eastus --name azure-functions
az storage account create -n dmpestorageaccount -g azure-functions --access-tier hot --https-only --kind StorageV2 --sku Standard_LRS --tags loc=eastus reason=func
az storage account update --custom-domain "storage.melive.xyz"
touch azure_blob_policy.json
az storage account management-policy create --account-name dmpestorageaccount -g azure-functions --policy "$(cat azure_blob_policy.json)"
# setup other alerting/monitoring rules as necessary

az functionapp create -n politico-brussels -c eastus -g azure-functions -s dmpestorageaccount --disable-app-insights true --os-type linux --runtime python --runtime-version 3.8 --functions-version 3 --tags reason=function

Estimated Costs

The goal was to also minimize costs as much as possible. Hence for example use of policies. According to my estimations, it should be 0.

Deployment

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-reference-python#publishing-to-azure

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-deployment-technologies

# remote (preffered)
func azure functionapp publish <APP_NAME>

# local
func azure functionapp publish <APP_NAME> --build local