Azure Functions

Azure Functions is Microsoft's venture into serverless architecture. It came onto the market in March 2016. Azure Functions allows functions to be coded in C#, F#, PHP, Node.js, Python, and Java. Azure Functions also supports bash, batch, and PowerShell files.  Azure Functions has seamless integration with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), Bitbucket, and GitHub, which will make continuous integration and continuous deployment easier. Azure Functions supports various types of event triggers, timer-based events for tasks, OneDrive, and SharePoint, which can be configured to trigger operations in functions. Real-time processing of data and files adds the ability to operate a serverless bot that uses Cortana as the information provider. Microsoft has introduced Logic Apps, a tool with a workflow-orchestration engine, which will allow less technical users to build serverless applications. Azure Functions allows triggers to be created in other Azure cloud services and HTTP requests. The maximum execution time is five minutes per function. Azure Functions provides two types of app service plan: Dynamic and Classic. App Service is a container or environment for a set of Azure functions to run in. The Dynamic option is similar to Lambda, where we pay for the time and memory our function uses to run. The Classic option is about allocating your own existing or provisioned app resources for the functions at no extra cost. The memory allotted is as per App Service, whereas in AWS Lambda, the memory allocation is per function. Azure Functions allows just 10 concurrent executions per function

Azure Functions follows a similar pricing model to AWS Lambda. The total cost is based on number to triggers executed and time. So the first one million requests are free, and beyond that, it will cost $0.02 for every 100,000 executions. 

We will be looking at automating the deployment of Azure Functions in Chapter 4, DevOps with Azure Functions, and also at how different DevOps processes will fit in to give Azure Functions a faster time to market.