Introduction

Azure Function is a serverless computing service hosted on Microsoft Azure public cloud. The main idea behind serverless computing, also known as Function as a service(FAAS), is to eliminate infrastructure considerations for the user.

Traditionally during development, IT team has to consider the underlying infrastructure requirement. For cloud applications, IT team used to monitor the application regardless of how much work the instance actually does for the business. Now with serverless, users can simply create and publish the code, based on the trigger the code will be executed.

Features

• It supports wide range of languages such as C#, Java, Javascript and Python
• Easily integrated with other Azure service offerings such as API Management, AKS etc
• Protects HTTP Functions with OAuth providers such as Azure AD, Azure AD B2C using identity providers such as Microsoft account, Google, Facebook etc.
• It has built-in code for triggers such as HTTP, Service Bus queue/topic, Event Hub/grid etc. Hence it minimises the lines of code. You will get to know about this feature in the upcoming articles.

Triggers

• HTTP Trigger: Runs code based on HTTP request.
• Timer: Scheduled code to run at predefined time.
• Service Bus Queue/Topic: Responds to new Service Bus message Queue/Topic.
• Blob Storage: Responds to new/modified Azure storage blob
• Cosmos DB: Responds to new/modified Azure Cosmos DB document.
• Event Grid: Responds to events through subscriptions and filters
• Event Hub: Response to high volume of Azure Event Hub Events
• Queue: Responds to new/modified Azure Queue Storage

Pricing tier

Azure functions comes with three pricing tier

• App Service Plan: This plan is similar to Web app. If you choose App service plan, your functions can run on same plan with no additional overhead cost.
• Consumption Plan: Azure provides all the necessary computing resource. You need to pay for the time that your code runs. This plan will automatically scale down/up based on the traffic.
• Premium Plan: This plan is similar to consumption plan but comes with the additional feature of pre-warming instances.

What’s next

In the upcoming articles, we’ll be focusing on most of the trigger type and finally, we’ll touch base on deploying the Azure Functions to containers such as Azure container instance and AKS.

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