Microsoft Azure Functions

 

What is Microsoft Azure?

In basic terms, Azure is a public cloud computing platform having solutions that include Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). These can be used for services like storage, virtual computing, analytics, networking, and others. To supplement or replace on-premise servers, you can use Microsoft Azure.

Several business verticals can have their individual set of reasons to choose Azure but here are some of the top advantages of Azure services that you can look into –

1. An industry-standard security process, Security Development Lifecycle has been designed by Microsoft Azure. All the stringent security features like ensuring the highest safety of operations and acquiring licenses are considered in this.
2. Microsoft Azure cloud has a unique hybrid cloud computing ecosystem. With the help of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), caches, ExpressRoute connections, and CDNs, this can improve the performance.
3. As an enterprise, you can create and deploy your own web apps without struggling with groundwork. Take advantage of the combination of Platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a platform (IaaS) of Microsoft Azure.
4. Microsoft Azure has a huge user base. Its infrastructure is continuously scaling up. It can run seamlessly without any additional coding.
5. With Microsoft Azure, your business processes can improve. It has analytics and intelligence that uses Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), cognitive APIs, and learning bots.
6. It is good to invest in a cloud performance that seamlessly integrates with all Microsoft products as most enterprises work with MS office tools. Adding to that, knowledge of C, C++, and Visual Basic can help you to boost your career in Microsoft Azure.
7. Azure services are known for their affordability as the maintenance of virtual infrastructure is highly cost-efficient.
8. To obtain actionable and deeper insights from the available data, Microsoft Azure also has NoSQL and SQL data processing.

Azure Functions

Microsoft Azure Functions is a serverless compute platform that helps you to develop with more efficiency by solving the complex problems of orchestration. You can debug and build locally without needing any additional setup. Easily operate and deploy at scale in the cloud and integrate services with the help of bindings and triggers.

Features –

Integrated Programming Model

Allows you to seamlessly connect to other services and respond to events.

Automated and Flexible Scaling

Now you can focus on adding value without worrying about managing the infrastructure.

Complete Development Experience

The in-built DevOps capabilities and integrated tools allow you to debug, build, monitor, and deploy.

A diverse range of hosting options and programming languages

Select the one that’s right for the scenario and adjust it according to your business requirements.

Integrated Security

HTTP-triggered functions can be protected with OAuth providers like Microsoft accounts, Azure AD, etc.

Open Source

The runtime of the function is open source.

Pay per use price model

A flexible consumption plan is available with Azure. If you are an existing user of App service for other applications, you can run the function on the same plan without any additional cost.

Choose Your Own Dependencies

Users can download code dependencies from NPM and NuGet. This will help you to use libraries needed to execute your code and are not available on NPM and NuGet.

Azure functions help you to receive a totally serverless application development experience. This ranges from debugging and building locally to monitoring and deploying it in the cloud. You can use the extensions of the functions on Visual Studio for a more efficient and quicker development on your local machine. This will be completely integrated with the entire Azure platform. With Azure Pipelines you can set up constant integration and delivery. You will also receive smart and proactive insights about the performance of the serverless application in the Azure Monitor.

Complex Orchestration Challenges Simplified

Serverless functions should be stateless and short-lived unless you want them to solve stateful problems. With the use of a fully managed service, this limitation can be removed without requiring more resources. Just simple coding will do the job. The complex stateful coordination requirements can be simplified with programs in applications having durable function extensions. The functions can be used on declarative workflows which work with over 250 connectors in Azure Logic Apps.

Other Services Can Be Connected Without Hard-Coding Integrations

Forget the long and lengthy lines of code. You will only have to write the codes which actually matter for your business. You can save up on your time with a trigger and binding-based programming model which allows your serverless application to respond to events and seamlessly connect with other services. With a microservices-friendly approach, you can build more scalable and stable event-driven applications.

Also Read: What is Cloud Computing

Create and Use Anywhere

There’s no one hosting plan that fits all as not all the applications are the same. You should select the Functions plan which matches your business requirements and uses the same code in multiple targets. It can be used from your Kubernetes cluster to pay-per-execution or IoT devices for edge computing.

Develop As You Want

You can begin coding right away for your serverless application with the technology stack that you love the most. There’s no need to learn new frameworks or languages. Select the language that you like the most and that suits your business scenario. The list is wide-ranging from APIs with .NET, Java, or Node.js, web apps to Machine Learning workflows with cloud automaton with PowerShell or Python.

Azure Functions Has Multiple Hosting Plans to Choose From

Premium Plan

You can use pre-warmed workers while automatically scaling depending on demand to run applications without any delay after being idle. Connect to VNETs after running on more powerful instances.

Consumption Plan

Automatically scale and pay only for your consumed resources when your functions are running. Instances of the Functions host are added dynamically in this plan and are removed depending on the number of incoming events.

Azure App Service Plan

A regular App Services plan rates, you can run Functions with this plan. This is suitable for the long-running operation and also when more costs and predictive scaling is needed.

Use Azure Functions to Build These

1. Serverless web applications for single-page applications and static websites
2. Serverless APIs with .NET or Node.js
3. Use Serverless architecture with Machine Learning workflows
4. Business apps with serverless rapid application development
5. For real-time data and files, serverless data processing pipelines
6. Serverless hybrid resources management and cloud automation

We hope that this write-up has helped you to understand all the necessary concepts of Azure functions. But this article is just a glimpse of Azure functions and how you can use them for serverless applications. Azure has a lot of additional cloud computing potential which you can leverage in any way you want. There are limitless possibilities with Azure and you can try it out today by taking a trial.

Source: https://www.ltechpro.com/blogs/microsoft-azure-functions