Serverless Technology Choices in Azure

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Welcome file

Which Azure Serverless Technology is the best choice for your business requirements?

Overview

In this article, we’ll be tackling the basics of Azure Serverless Technology and help you to choose the best one for a general set of business requirements.

Prerequisites include: basic knowledge on terminologies such as workflows, orchestration, and application programming. Please get comfortable with these foundational topics before you jump into this article :).

What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing is a cloud-hosted execution environment with a single or group of server(s) that run your code, but abstracts the underlying hosting environment. The main concept is that we are not responsible for the infrastructure or the maintenance of the server. And we don’t have to worry about the outages or increase in demand during peak situations like the holidays or for the Black Friday season ;) . The cloud provider takes care of maintenance, scalability, and everything else for you.

You just create an instance of the service and write your code in any desired language. That’s it!

Today we are going to see the two most popular and commonly used Azure Serverless technologies: Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps.

Azure Functions

With the Azure Functions service, you can host a single method or function by using a popular programming language in the cloud that runs in response to an event. An example of an event might be an HTTP request, a new message on a queue, or a message on a timer.

Functions can be written in many common programming languages, such as C#, Python, JavaScript, Typescript, Java, and PowerShell.

Key Features

  • Scales automatically

  • Charges are applied only when the function is triggered

  • The best choice when demands are variable

  • Performs orchestration tasks via an optional extension called Durable Functions

Azure Logic Apps

Logic Apps is a low-code/no-code development platform hosted as a cloud service. This service helps you automate and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need to integrate apps, data, systems, and services across enterprises or organizations

We build an app by linking triggers to actions with connectors.

A trigger is an event (such as a timer) that causes an app to execute.

An action is a task or step that can be executed. (Available in different programming languages)

To build enterprise integration solutions with Azure Logic Apps, you can choose from a growing gallery of over 200 connectors. The gallery includes services such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle DB, and file shares.

Differences

Example Use Cases

When to choose Azure Functions

For Code-based projects. where you write and test the code. You will be able to debug without including or provisioning test resources in the cloud.

  • If you have your code / logic / automated tasks already ready in your desired language, it is easier to just insert the code into Azure Functions than to create it from scratch using Azure Logic Apps.

  • If you need to perform some complex logic or specialized data parsing, Azure Functions is the best choice since you have full control of the code and visualizing / performing complex logic workflows is tough to do in Azure Logic Apps.

When to choose Azure Logic Apps

For GUI based projects. It’s preferable if we don’t want to get involved with developer resources and instead want to use the GUI. Best suited for integration since lots of connectors are available out of the box.

  • If you need to perform more orchestration tasks from different APIs, go for Azure Logic Apps.

  • Also, If you need a visual workflow, Azure Logic Apps is the best choice.

A combination of both is also the best choice for large scale enterprise cloud environments.

Conclusion

In this article, we have just covered the high level overview and the differences between Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps. Please go through the official Microsoft documentation cited in the References section for further learning.

References

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/serverless-fundamentals/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-compare-logic-apps-ms-flow-webjobs

Happy learning!



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