Posted on: October 20, 2017
Has your enterprise taken advantage of Azure Serverless yet? If not, you’re missing out. Today’s post will take a closer look at what Azure Serverless is and how it can improve the way your business builds apps.
What is Azure Serverless?
Contrary to what the name may indicate, Azure Serverless doesn’t actually mean that there’s NO server involved. Instead, it simply means that there’s no server that YOU have to worry about. Serverless tech and Azure serverless tools allow for the rapid development of all types of applications, simply by tapping into the cloud. So, what does that mean for your organization? Well, in a nutshell, it means that you and your team get to focus 100 percent on building awesome apps. There’s no more stressing over the details of provisioning and maintaining servers – even when your workload expands. It’s a whole new (and much faster) way to create and deploy great apps and improve business.
Azure Serverless Up Close
Up until now, writing new applications has demanded that developers take the time to answer some fundamental questions about the infrastructure. Where is the app going to run? How will the app be able to scale on demand? How will the app be monitored? Finding the answers to questions like these can eat up a lot of development and operations investments. This is frustrating for developers who just want to write code and manage business problems. With Azure Serverless, developers can do just that. By abstracting the infrastructure and making it so that both the app coding and business logic are central, Serverless allows your team to focus on their primary goals and to achieve those objectives much faster and more efficiently.
A number of fully managed services are offered via the Azure Serverless platform. These services include computing, storage, databasing, monitoring, analytics, intelligence, and more. There are, however, two items that are key to serverless application development:
Azure Functions
Azure Functions offers Function as a Service (FaaS). Here, all you need to do is provide your code (Azure supports numerous languages including C#, JavaScript, and Python). From here, the code is executed on demand. Functions are able to be authored and/or debugged locally via a developer’s machine. Additionally, it takes advantage of a concept referred to as “bindings” which allows data to stream in and out through other services, such as Azure Storage and Event Hubs. Functions are able to scale in order to meet app needs automatically.
Azure Logic Apps
Azure Logic Apps allows for serverless workflows within the cloud. As an example, when viewing an operation as a customer, it’s easy to see that there are a few pieces of functionality that will need to be executed. Perhaps you need to add a new customer to your database, create a welcome message or email, develop a user login, etc. With Logic Apps, data and processing are orchestrated in such a way that these individual, isolated steps become a coherent workflow. Over 150 connectors to important services are available with Logic Apps so that developers are able to integrate data both in and out of serverless apps with ease. In other words, no more coming up with overly complicated “glue-code” across disparate systems.
With Azure Serverless, it’s easier than ever to build any type of cloud application that you desire. Serverless easily combines the power of IoT, data processing, automation, intelligence, and messaging in a way that offers much better agility and more incredible power for delivering end-to-end solutions. To learn more about all that Azure and Azure Serverless have to offer, reach out to the team at Uncommon Solutions today.
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