Microsoft Azure Functions

Microsoft Azure added Functions to its 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 its own command line utilities and developer friendliness taken into account.

Focus

Running functions locally, authenticated or unauthenticated, enables you to write both cronjobs and http responses for your website. There are options available to connect to storage, serverless databases, and OpenAI 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.’

In 2024, Microsoft joined the current serverless CaaS trend and launched the managed Kubernetes environment Azure Container Apps.