Microsoft added Functions to it’s product portfolio by the end of 2016.
Back then the cloud provider looked more like a follower rather than a category leader. Today that image seems to have shifted. Azure Functions is a complete, well rounded product with it’s own command line utilities and developer friendlyness taken into account.
Running functions locally, authenticated or unauthenticated enables you to write both cronjobs as well as http responses for your website. There are options to connect to storage and serverless databases available as well.
The documentation is full of tutorials and examples, even leveraging Machine Learning tools such as PyTorch and Tensorflow. This brings us to the Azure Functions cost factor. To quote their documentation: ‘The execution cost of a single function execution is measured in GB-seconds. Execution cost is calculated by combining its memory usage with its execution time. A function that runs for longer costs more, as does a function that consumes more memory.’