Azure Functions is the serverless compute offering in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Essentially, you don’t even need a virtual machine (VM) to run an Azure Function. Azure Functions are just an implementation of platform as a service (PaaS), one that is based on an event-driven programming model. This article presents an introduction to Azure Functions, why they are useful, and how we can work with them.
As there are no servers that you have to manage, Azure Functions can scale automatically, and you pay only for the time your code runs. You can leverage Azure Functions for event processing in real time, or for scheduled data processing jobs, such as scheduled data backup or data clean-up. You can even use Azure Functions as serverless back ends to mobile applications.
Here’s a quick glance at some of the striking features of Azure Functions:
- Flexible code deployment (through Azure Portal or GitHub, for example)
- Support for multiple languages (C#, F#, Java, Node.js, or PHP)
- Support for external dependencies via NuGet or NPM
- Easy integrations with other Azure services
