Introducing Microsoft Azure Services and Functions

This is an era of buzzwords. The moment we become familiar with one buzzword, another emerges and we start chasing it again. It started with cloud computing, DevOps, and now serverless computing.

This chapter introduces some of the fundamental concepts and terminology to give the reader a baseline understanding of cloud computing, cloud service models, and cloud deployment models. We will also understand what functions are and get acquainted with some of the related concepts of Microsoft Azure.

We will use a free trial of Azure Functions to get familiar with it. We will execute the sample function of printing Hello World! using Azure Functions.

The following are the topics that we will cover in this chapter:

• An overview of serverless architectures
• Why functions?
• An overview of Microsoft Azure services
• Azure App Services versus Azure Functions versus AWS Lambda