We’re excited to share that Forrester has named Microsoft as a leader in the inaugural report, The Forrester New Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2020 based on their evaluation of Azure Functions and integrated development tooling. We believe Forrester’s findings reflect the strong momentum of event-driven applications in Azure and our vision, crediting Azure Functions with“robust programming model and integration capabilities”, and also confirm Microsoft’s commitment to be the best technology partner for you as customers call out the responsiveness of Microsoft Azure’s “engineering and support teams as key to their success.”
Best-in-class development experience
Azure Functions is an event-driven serverless compute platform with a programming model based on triggers and bindings for accelerated and simplified applications development. Fully integrated with other Azure services and development tools, its end-to-end development experience allows you to build and debug your functions locally on any major platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux), as well as deploy and monitor them in the cloud. You can even deploy the exact same functions code to other environments, such as your own infrastructure or your Kubernetes cluster, enabling seamless hybrid deployments.
In their report, Forrester noted Azure Functions programming model“supports a multitude of programming languages with extensive integration options, … and bindings for Azure Event Hub, and Azure Event Grid helps developers build event-driven microservices.”
Enterprise-grade FaaS platform
Enterprise customers like Chipotle love the velocity and productivity that event-driven architectures bring to developing applications. We are committed to building great experiences that enable the modernization of those enterprise workloads, and the Forrester report states that “strategic adopters of Azure will find that Azure Functions helps integrate Microsoft’s fast-expanding array of cloud services”, making that transformation journey easier. Some of our latest innovations are focused on the needs of enterprise customers, such as the Premium plan to host functions without cold-start for low latency workloads or PowerShell support enabling serverless automation scenarios for cloud and hybrid deployments.
In their report, Forrester also recognized Azure Functions as “a good fit for companies that need stateful functions” thanks to Durable Functions, an extension to the Azure Functions runtime that brings stateful and orchestration capabilities to serverless functions. Durable Functions stands alone in the serverless space, providing stateful functions and a way to define serverless workflows programmatically. Forrester mentioned specifically in the report that “clients modernizing enterprise apps will find that Durable Functions offers an alternative to refactoring existing business logic into bite-size stateless chunks.”
Read the full Forrester report and learn more about Azure Functions today.
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