Go Serverless with Azure

The main clause of clouds "pay only for what you use", however, if you used "Web App" service or "Service Fabric" you will see it is not fully true. Even when you have no requests your App Plan still running, in case of "Service Fabric" the minimum size of scale-set is 5 VMs resulting in a bill of more than 1000$ per month for nothing. Now we will talk what is serverless cloud computing and how it fixes these issues.

Serverless, the future platform for next-gen apps

So what is serverless? Basically, they are cloud services that allow processing your data and running your code without any knowledge about servers and billing model based on requests count and other parameters excluding any idle time processes etc. Here are some of the Azure services that can be called serverless.

First of them is Azure Functions - it is service that runs your code and allows configuring triggers and bindings for it, for example, "receive HTTP post and store data to DB" or "parse item added to a queue and send SMS", below is a list of available triggers and bindings for now.

The simplest trigger for the Azure function is a Timer, it is just calling your code every configured period.

Another example is Azure Storage trigger which triggers your code when the new blob is added to a container.

And most popular one is an HTTP trigger, here is a code sample that returns a list of text + imageUrl items stored in an Azure Table.

Azure Functions is super scalable and can easily process billions of requests with sub-second scaling. It is very usable for IoT to process small events from the massive quantity of devices.

To see a full picture how Azure Functions actually runs, look at a picture below

You have just finished reading an intro to Azure Functions if you interested in some aspect of it in details, leave your questions and I will answer.

Thanks for your time!