Forrester has named Microsoft as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2021 based on their evaluation of Azure Functions with recognition for upping its developer experience game and stateful capabilities.
Development experience
Azure Functions is 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 build functions using multitude of programming languages: C#, Node.js, Python, JavaScript, Java, and PowerShell.
In their report, Forrester recognized Azure Functions investments in “onboarding, developer tools support, and support for the development and debugging on local machines.”
Stateful workloads in a serverless compute environment
There are some use cases of serverless that need to be stateful—such as long-running workflows, human approved processes, and e-commerce shopping cart applications. 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 “Durable Functions provides stateful capabilities and bindings for Azure Event Hub, and Azure Event Grid helps developers build event-driven microservices.”
Enterprise-grade FaaS platform
Enterprise customers are seeking the productivity and agility that event-driven architectures bring to developing applications. With Azure Functions, you can deploy to other environments, such as your own infrastructure or your Kubernetes cluster using containers, enabling seamless hybrid deployments.
Azure Functions features input and output bindings which provide a means of pulling data or pushing data to other serverless services. Forrester noted that “bindings for Azure Event Hub and Azure Event Grid helps developers build event-driven microservices.”
Azure Functions offers built-in integration with Azure Application Insights and Azure Monitor, allowing you to easily diagnose issues and better understand how your functions are used.
Customer momentum
Learn how customers such as Mitsubishi Electric, East West Bank, and Blackmores Group are using Functions in their event-driven architectures. We are committed to making Azure Functions the ideal FaaS platform, and this recognition comes at a significant point in our journey.
Read the full Forrester report and get started with Azure Functions today.
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