You can run the sample locally, just like the other Spring Cloud Function samples:
and curl -H "Content-Type: text/plain" localhost:8080/function -d '{"value": "hello foobar"}'.
You will need the az CLI app and some node.js fu (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-create-first-java-maven for more detail). To deploy the function on Azure runtime:
$ az login $ mvn azure-functions:deploy
On another terminal try this: curl https://<azure-function-url-from-the-log>/api/uppercase -d '{"value": "hello foobar!"}'. Please ensure that you use the right URL for the function above. Alternatively you can test the function in the Azure Dashboard UI (click on the function name, go to the right hand side and click "Test" and to the bottom right, "Run").
The input type for the function in the Azure sample is a Foo with a single property called "value". So you need this to test it with something like below:
{
"value": "foobar"
}