Serverless in Azure
Spend less time managing infrastructure and more time solving business problems. With serverless in Azure, provisioning, scaling, and management of resources is handled for you.
Build applications without worrying about servers
Focus on the business logic for your applications while infrastructure management is handled for you. Serverless in Azure means faster time to market with lower infrastructure and operating costs.
Take advantage of fully managed services
Serverless is the abstraction of servers, but that’s just the beginning of the value that building serverless computing solutions on Azure provides. Take advantage of innovative programming models unique to Azure, that simplify event-driven computing. Use a rich set of managed services for data, messaging, and intelligence to create scalable, highly available applications. Enable your teams to focus on solving business problems, rather than repetitive infrastructure management.
Increase productivity with an end-to-end development experience
Serverless is a new way of building applications, and it requires modern tools. Azure offers a comprehensive set of development, deployment, and management tools. Local development and debugging through Visual Studio or the Azure CLI, continuous deployment through Azure DevOps tools, and live monitoring through Application Insights combine to deliver ultimate end-to-end developer productivity in the cloud.
Build on an open source foundation
Serverless in Azure builds on an open source foundation, the core of which is Azure Functions, an event-driven compute experience and open source project. Community contributions include support for new languages, integrations, and deployment targets. Azure is also the only cloud to support open-standard CloudEvents. Event-driven applications are now possible using CloudEvents with the Event Grid event-routing service.
Run your serverless solutions anywhere
Functions can be used on-premises, in hybrid environments like Azure Stack, on IoT Edge devices, and deployed on top of orchestrators such as Kubernetes—as well as in other clouds. Gain flexibility in deployment options, the ability to reuse code, and the ability to rely on the same productive programming model irrespective of deployment target.
Customers are doing great things with serverless in Azure
Examples of serverless applications possible in Azure
Web application backends
Online orders are picked up from a queue, processed, and resulting data is stored in a database.
Mobile application backends
A mobile application user updates a shared task list which triggers notifications for other users.
Real-time file processing
Patient records are securely uploaded as PDF files. That data is then decomposed, processed using optical character recognition (OCR) detection, and added to a database for easy queries.
Real-time stream processing
Telemetry data gets collected from an IoT device. That data is processed in near real-time and stored in a database for use in an analytics dashboard.
Build your serverless applications with Azure
Enjoy freedom from infrastructure management no matter what type of application you’re building or technologies you’re using. With Azure, get your choice of serverless execution environments, a set of fully managed services, and productive developer tools to build your applications.
Serverless execution environments
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 like Kubernetes, IoT Edge, on-premises, or even in other clouds.
Serverless containers
A first-of-its-kind service, Azure Container Instances allows you to securely run containers on demand. Get the flexibility and portability of a container-focused experience without worrying about compute resources.
Serverless Kubernetes orchestration
Open source Virtual Kubelet technology brings the orchestration capabilities of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to serverless containers for creating serverless Kubernetes-based applications.
Serverless application environments
Run and scale web and mobile applications on the platform of your choice, in a fully managed environment with App Service.
Use Service Fabric Mesh to deploy applications and services architected as microservices in a container-native experience, without worrying about underlying compute.
Fully managed services
Serverless database
Azure Cosmos DB, a multi-model database service, provides transparent scaling and replication of your data to wherever your users are—without laborious database management tasks.
Serverless messaging
The Event Grid event-routing service enables rich application scenarios by enabling you to connect serverless logic to events coming from multiple Azure services. It also connects to events from external sources, through support for CloudEvents.
The Service Bus messaging infrastructure enables you to build distributed and scalable cloud solutions with connections across private and public cloud environments.
Serverless workflow orchestration
Logic Apps provide serverless workflows for developers to easily integrate data with their apps instead of writing complex glue code between disparate systems. Logic Apps also allows you to orchestrate and connect the serverless functions and APIs of your application.
Serverless analytics
Author queries in simple, declarative, SQL-like language, and pay only for the processing used per job with Azure Stream Analytics for real-time streaming data.
Simplify mass ingestion of small data inputs from devices and sensors to process, route, and store the data—with Event Hubs.
Serverless intelligence
With Bot Service, build intelligent bots that interact with your users through channels such as text/SMS, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Office 365, and Twitter.
Add sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, language understanding, and search into your application with Cognitive Services. Using these services through Functions or Logic Apps minimizes the learning curve for creating intelligent applications.
Developer tools
Integrated development environment (IDE)
Streamline serverless development by enabling a fully local build, debug, and publish experience from within the IDE with Visual Studio developer tools for Functions.
The Azure Functions extension for Visual Studio Code provides a lightweight editing, debugging, and publishing experience for building serverless applications from a development OS of your choice.
Visual Studio developer tools for Logic Apps enable you to visually design, build, and deploy your logic apps from within Visual Studio.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery
Azure DevOps allow you to build a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow for your serverless applications.
Monitoring, logging, and diagnostics
Application Insights is an extensible application performance management service to monitor your serverless applications, detect performance anomalies, and diagnose issues.
Documentation
Learn how to use Functions with these quickstarts, tutorials, and samples
Start building with a serverless platform
Get 1,000,000 Azure Functions requests per month for free with your account.