The majority of the organizations are leveraging the power of the cloud to accelerate their business and transform for the future. Microsoft Azure has been the frontrunner when it comes to PaaS (Platform as a Service) and has been honoring a decade-long commitment in order to let the developers get access to world-class tools and services.
Azure Functions has been elementary in offering a serverless computing experience for application development and rapid scale up. Microsoft has today announced the general availability of Azure Functions the preview for which was released in March 2016.
Azure Functions
Functions now support C#, JavaScript is generally available while F#, Powershell, PHP, Python and Bash are still in preview. Azure Functions is being built in the open with GitHub community the team has accordingly gathered feedback from the customers and improvised accordingly. Unlike other Enterprise solutions, the Microsoft Azure Functions seems to be in constant dialogue with the customers in order to improve its offerings.
Tooling Support comes integrated
Azure Functions supports creating, running and debugging Functions locally on Windows. The service integrates with Visual Studio Code when it comes to JavaScript Functions on NodeJS. The caveat, however, is that the CLI currently works only on Windows with impending support for Mac and Linux. Also, Azure Functions will soon be adding support for Visual Studio 2015 tooling.
Creating bindings for other services is now easy and just takes a few clicks. Azure services including Blob Storage, Event Hub, Service Bus, Storage Tables and other external services like OneDrive and DropBox are supported as well. Azure Storage is capable of triggering a function when a new file is uploaded thus leading to lesser efforts from the developer’s end.
Azure Functions charges the users for the resources used by billing them on the time basis and the memory consumed. Also, Azure Functions includes a free grant of 400,000 GB-s. Scaling up and down is also pretty easy since Azure Functions charges only for the resources used and one can also set a daily spending cap in order to prevent runaway functions.
