Build, deploy, and operate serverless apps on an end-to-end platform
Deliver more value to the core of your business by minimizing the time and resources you spend on infrastructure-related requirements. Use fully managed, end-to-end Azure serverless solutions to boost developer productivity, optimize resources, and accelerate the pace of innovation.
Why choose Azure serverless solutions?
Increase developer velocity
Reduce the time spent on tasks that are non-core to the business by freeing developers from infrastructure provisioning and management. Build and deploy faster using developer-friendly APIs, low-code/no-code services, and ready-to-use machine learning and cognitive models.
Boost team performance
Improve team agility and performance by using a fully managed platform to build, deploy, and operate applications. Build for any application pattern and environment—hybrid, cloud, and edge. Proactively manage applications with intelligent monitoring and analysis tools.
Improve organizational impact
Accelerate time to market with Azure serverless solutions that help your organization clear the path to innovation and new revenue opportunities. Reduce your infrastructure total cost of ownership and minimize risk with intelligent security management and advanced threat protection.
Build with end-to-end Azure serverless solutions
Enjoy freedom from infrastructure management no matter what type of application you’re building or technologies you’re using. Choose from a range of serverless execution environments, fully managed services, and a comprehensive set of developer tools and services to build your applications.
Azure serverless compute
Build applications faster by eliminating the need to manage the infrastructure that runs your code and containers
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Serverless Kubernetes
Elastically provision pods inside container instances that start in seconds without the need to manage additional compute resources. Create serverless, Kubernetes-based applications using the orchestration capabilities of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and AKS virtual nodes, which are built on the open-source Virtual Kubelet project. Get the best of an event-driven approach by adding KEDA event-driven autoscaling to your AKS cluster. KEDA is an open-source component that enables containers to process events directly from event sources, and it provides the ability to scale to zero.
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Serverless functions
Execute code—written in the language of your choice—with Azure Functions, an event-driven compute experience. Scale on demand and pay only for the time your code is executed. Available as a managed service in Azure and Azure Stack, the open source Functions runtime also works on multiple destinations, including Kubernetes, Azure IoT Edge, on-premises, and even in other clouds.
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Serverless application environments
Run and scale web, mobile, and API applications on the platform of your choice—in a high-productivity, fully managed environment—with Azure App Service.
"When we can develop a solution in a week using Azure Functions versus four months using traditional methods, that represents a drastic improvement in our ability to solve business-critical problems and focus our developer talent wherever it's most needed."
Azure serverless workflows and integration
Create new apps by orchestrating event-based serverless architectures. Build connected services more easily using a simple API facade that abstracts API implementation complexity.
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Serverless workflow orchestration
Integrate data and apps instead of writing complex glue code between disparate systems. Visually create serverless workflows with Azure Logic Apps and use your own APIs, serverless functions, or out-of-the-box software as a service (SaaS) connectors, including Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, and Dropbox.
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Serverless API management
Publish, secure, transform, maintain, and monitor APIs with Azure API Management, a fully managed service that offers a usage model designed and implemented to be an organic fit for serverless applications.
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Serverless messaging
Simplify event-based application scenarios with Azure Event Grid. Connect serverless logic to events coming from multiple Azure services and external sources using the CloudEvents schema. Build distributed and scalable cloud solutions with connections across private and public cloud environments with the Azure Service Bus messaging infrastructure.
"We can deliver exactly what we had in mind with Azure Logic Apps because it is a flexible and high-performance platform. It offers monitoring of a quality that we have never seen before, and which allows us, for example, to detect anomalies even before they impact our customers. And the pay-per-use economic model is much more advantageous."
DevOps and developer tools for serverless
Create serverless apps using familiar tools right from your own developer environment and on your favorite operating system. Get first-class services to build, test and deploy functions, containers, and Kubernetes-based applications
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CI/CD for serverless
Get unlimited, cloud-hosted private git repos with Azure DevOps. Easily set up continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), add automatic package management, automatically trigger builds, and deploy to Kubernetes, Azure Functions, Azure Web Apps, or any cloud.
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App development tools
Build, run, and debug serverless applications with a comprehensive set of developer tools. Use emulators to develop your apps locally for advanced scenarios like Functions and Kubernetes, then easily target them to Azure when you’re ready to deploy.
AI and machine learning for serverless
Infuse your serverless applications with ready-to-use AI and machine learning algorithms. Improve productivity and reduce costs with autoscaling compute and DevOps for machine learning.
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Cognitive computing
Enable your serverless apps to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret your user needs through natural methods of communication using Azure Cognitive Services via an API or deployed as containers on Kubernetes.
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Conversation bots
Use Azure Bot Service to build intelligent bots that interact naturally with your users through channels such as text/SMS, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Office 365, and Twitter.
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Machine learning models
Build, train, and deploy models on Azure Machine Learning, from the cloud to the edge.
"Azure Cognitive Services and the easy integration offered by Azure help us build solutions and onboard new customers in just four to six weeks."
Azure serverless database
Build serverless apps with low-latency access to rich data for a global user base. Use Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed, massively scalable, multi-model database service, to create database triggers, input bindings, and output bindings.
"Azure Cognitive Services and the easy integration offered by Azure help us build solutions and onboard new customers in just four to six weeks."
Azure serverless storage
Build static web applications on Azure Blob storage or use it as massively scalable storage for unstructured data. Leverage storage events to respond to operations on blobs with multiple serverless architectures. Blob events are pushed through Event Grid to subscribers using Functions, Logic Apps, or even your own custom HTTP listener.
Using a scalable architecture, camera frames are uploaded into Blob storage, which triggers Azure Functions, returns the number of people in the image, and outputs it into Azure Event Hubs.
Azure serverless monitoring
As serverless eliminates traditional infrastructure management tasks, it’s more important than ever that developers have the right instrumentation in place to help debug serverless apps. Gain full observability into your serverless apps using Azure Monitor, an extensible application performance management service to monitor your applications. Collect, analyze, and act on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments to maximize the availability and performance of your apps.
"By running containerized software in Azure, we have a standard way to create, monitor, scale, and manage our applications. We move and respond to customer needs faster. That's what agility is all about."
Azure serverless analytics
Easily develop and run massively parallel real-time analytics on multiple streams of data—including IoT—using Azure Stream Analytics. With no infrastructure to manage, process data on demand, scale instantly, and only pay per job. Quickly build real-time dashboards with Microsoft Power BI for a live command and control view.
"Our Azure-based analytics pipeline can handle the billion events a month we're throwing at it, and with it, we're improving our games at an even faster cadence."
Azure serverless solution architectures
Architect scalable e-commerce web app
- 1 User accesses the web app in browser and signs in.
- 2 Browser pulls static resources such as images from Azure Content Delivery Network.
- 3 User searches for products and queries SQL database.
- 4 Web site pulls product catalog from database.
- 5 Web app pulls product images from Blob Storage.
- 6 Page output is cached in Azure Cache for Redis for better performance.
- 7 User submits order and order is placed in the queue.
- 8 Azure Functions processes order payment.
- 9 Azure Functions makes payment to third party and records payment in SQL database.
Use the AKS virtual node to provision pods inside ACI that start in seconds. This enables AKS to run with just enough capacity for your average workload. As you run out of capacity in your AKS cluster, scale out additional pods in ACI without any additional servers to manage.
- 1 User registers container in Azure Container Registry
- 2 Container images are pulled from the Azure Container Registry
- 3 AKS virtual node, a Virtual Kubelet implementation, provisions pods inside ACI from AKS when traffic comes in spikes.
- 4 AKS and ACI containers write to shared data store
CI/CD for Containers
Containers make it very easy for you to continuously build and deploy your applications. By orchestrating deployment of those containers using Kubernetes in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you can achieve replicable, manageable clusters of containers.
By setting up a continuous build to produce your container images and orchestration, Azure DevOps increases the speed and reliability of your deployment.
- 1 Change application source code
- 2 Commit Application Code
- 3 Continuous integration triggers application build, container image build and unit tests
- 4 Container image pushed to Azure Container Registry
- 5 Continuous deployment trigger orchestrates deployment of application artefacts with environment specific parameters
- 6 Deployment to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- 7 Container is launched using Container Image from Azure Container Registry
- 8 Application Insights collects and analyses health, performance and usage data
- 9 Review health, performance and usage information
- 10 Update backlog item
Resources for serverless solutions
Latest Azure serverless blogs
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March 11, 2020
Microsoft named a leader in The Forrester New Wave: Functions-as-a-Service Platforms
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February 24, 2020
Preview of Active Directory authentication support on Azure Files
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November 6, 2019
Serverless for the enterprise with Microsoft Azure
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August 20, 2019
Reducing SAP implementations from months to minutes with Azure Logic Apps
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July 3, 2019
Highlights from SIGMOD 2019: New advances in database innovation
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June 26, 2019
Event-driven analytics with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
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June 20, 2019
Gartner names Microsoft a leader in 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise iPaaS
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June 4, 2019
Announcing self-serve experience for Azure Event Hubs Clusters
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May 29, 2019
Simplifying event-driven architectures with the latest updates to Event Grid
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