Cloud providers have brought a revolution in the cloud market by introducing serverless computing services over the internet. Many top cloud providers such as Amazon Web services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform have launched serverless computing. Often the term serverless computing is misunderstood with a type of computing without servers. In actuality, servers run in the background to handle all operations, but cloud providers are responsible for managing, scaling up or down, and maintaining those servers.
What is Serverless Computing?
Serverless computing provides inbuilt infrastructures and a runtime environment to develop applications rapidly. It is the next-generation evolution of Platform as a Service. There is no need to worry about infrastructure, scaling, management, and provisioning at all. You can manage real-life applications also and pay for the resources you consume. Whenever the application is in an idle state, you are not charged for it.
What does Serverless Computing do?
Serverless Computing helps users directly focus on the development part of the application rather than worrying about the infrastructure. Developers can innovatively code for the application, whereas serverless computing can take care of the server-related requirements with flexibility. There is no need to worry about any sort of provisioning, purchasing, and managing backend servers. It follows an architecture where vendors provide required backend services to developers.
Best Servers in serverless computing
There are a couple of best trending servers in serverless computing listed down below:
Microsoft Azure:
Azure is a Microsoft cloud computing product to build, test, deploy and manage applications. There are many data centers available globally to provide the best services with minimum latency.
AWS Lambda:
It is a serverless, event-driven cloud computing platform developed by Amazon. It runs codes in response to various events and automatically manages computing resources required by that code.
Google Cloud Function for Firebase:
It is a serverless framework that enables users to automatically run the backend code in response to various events triggered by HTTPS requests and firebase features. Users do not need to manage and scale their own servers as their code is stored in Google’s cloud and run in a managed environment.
Oracle Functions:
It helps developers to deploy and manage applications in a managed environment.
Also Check: Our blog post on Azure Traffic Manager.
Advantages of Serverless Computing
Let’s have a look at the advantages of Serverless computing.
- You need to pay for only those resources you use.
- There is no need to manage servers and pay extra costs for their maintenance.
- It provides dynamic scalability.
- It provides quick deployments and constant updates.
- It promises very low latency as the code runs in the nearest region, closer to the end-users.
Why choose Azure Serverless Computing?
There are many serverless computing options available today in the market. But why only Azure Serverless Computing? Let’s find out the reasons to choose it.
- Azure comes up with built-in intelligence to enable user’s code with machine learning and cognitive services. It helps in developing intelligent applications. It helps in building smart applications.
- Azure serverless computing offers to create endless connections, which means users can use multiple functionalities from various sources.
- It provides local debugging in visual studio, Visual debug history, deployment, etc. It can boost the productivity of any organization.
Also Read: Our blog post on Azure Bastion.
Microsoft Azure Serverless Architecture
Let’s try to understand the Azure Serverless Architecture.
Users go to their browser to access the application and sign in. Now, the browser starts pulling the static resources like images from Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network). Users make use of SQL queries to search various products from the database. This time, the website pulls the product catalog from the database and product images from blob storage.
To provide a better performance, Azure cache for Redis cached the page output. The Azure function makes payments to the third party and stores the record in the SQL database. Users submit their orders and order is placed in a queue. Now it’s the turn of the Azure function to process the payment.
Also Check: Our blog post on Azure Load Balancer.
Azure Function
Azure Function is a bit of independent code that is ready to get executed. It is a cutting-edge serverless design based on an event-driven approach. It helps to function in the cloud without worrying about the infrastructure or the platform where the function is running. Developers can code in any language of their own choice, such as Javascript, Java, C#, F#. Users can also include npm libraries and NuGet to Azure functions. But it is likely preferred to utilize the already solved solutions in an optimized manner.
Azure Function is a serverless offering where users pay for what they use. It directly optimizes the cost. Users are only billed when the Azure function is running, not when the Azure Function is in an idle state. Azure functions mean no other virtual machine is running to handle the servers.
The azure function can begin with various triggers such as BLOB being embedded in a compartment or an HTTP demand. Outer administrations can also trigger the Azure function.
In simpler terms, Azure Functions runs an event-triggered code. This means that if a particular event or a set of events occurs, then it will run code. Further, it will manage all the resources dynamically while doing that.
You can also take advantage of over 250 connectors provided by Azure Functions with Azure Logic Apps. Additionally, the data processed by Azure Functions can persist in Azure data services like Azure SQL, Azure Storage, and Document DB.
Advantages of Azure Serverless Computing
- Developers can code in any language of their choice without worrying about the servers.
- Users can use Azure Cosmos DB for storing the data of their serverless applications. Cosmos DB replicates the data across regions and provides the best services to the users of the application.
- Microsoft Azure provides top-notch security to developers. Azure Active Directory helps developers to access resources securely and manage their serverless applications.
- Microsoft Azure provides scalable cloud storage for developers.
- It helps in Cloud Messaging.
- It provides API management and so many other services.
Developer tools and services provided by Microsoft Azure
Let’s have a look at the development tools from Microsoft.
- DevOps and Developer Tools
- It provides app development tools to build, run and debug serverless applications.
- It provides CI/CD for Serverless and numerous cloud-hosted private git repositories. It automatically adds package management and so many other functionalities.
- Workflow and Integrations
- It provides Serverless Workflow Orchestration that helps to integrate data and applications. Azure logic apps also help to design a serverless workflow.
- Its Serverless Messaging feature helps to simplify event-based application scenarios with Azure Event Grid.
- It also provides Azure Serverless API Management to publish, transform, secure, and monitor APIs.
- Computation Services
- The Serverless Function feature helps to execute the code of any language. Deployed applications can be scaled up or down on demand.
- A serverless Application Environment helps to scale any API application on the user’s own choice.
- Serverless Kubernetes provides services for orchestration capabilities and virtual nodes.
- Database
- Users can use Azure Cosmos DB as it is a serverless database that is scalable, globally distributed, and multi-model database service.
- Monitoring Services
- Azure Serverless Monitoring helps to observe the application after deployment.
- Azure Serverless Analytics helps to run massively parallel analytics or multiple streams of data. PowerBi is a beneficial tool from Microsoft to build powerful reports and dashboards.
FAQs
Q1. What is Azure serverless computing?
Ans: Azure Serverless computing helps developers to build powerful applications by eliminating the need to provision and manage infrastructure. In Serverless computing, cloud vendors provision, manage and scale the infrastructure as per the need.
Q2. Why is Azure serverless?
Ans: You should choose Azure serverless computing because it helps developers to develop and run massively parallel real-time analytics easily on various data streams. Moreover, there is no need to manage the infrastructure as Azure is doing it for you.
Q3. Is Azure AKS serverless?
Ans: Azure AKS is a serverless, fully managed Kubernetes service to deploy and manage containerized applications. It offers elastic provisioning that eliminates the need to maintain and provision servers.
Q4. What is an example of serverless computing?
Ans: Let’s have a look at the examples of Serverless computing:
- AWS Lambda
- Microsoft Azure Functions
- Google Cloud Functions
- IBM OpenWhisk
Q5. Is serverless the same as the cloud?
Ans: Serverless computing is another form of cloud computing where customers do not need to manage servers. Instead, they only need to run the code. It automatically takes care of the scalability and performance as per the load.
Conclusion
Microsoft Azure serverless computing benefits businesses by optimizing the resources, cost, and time. Azure serverless solutions are fully managed solutions that result in increased productivity, better utilization of resources and ultimately help businesses to focus more on innovative strategies.