Serverless Computing Offerings Enhanced

Updates to Microsoft’s serverless computing offerings bring improved development and monitoring tools, the ability to host some of the technologies on-premises, and better integration with the PowerApps and Flow business application development environments. Serverless computing, which the company primarily supports with the Azure Functions service, allows developers to build distributed applications where events trigger server sessions that only persist while executing requested functionality. Microsoft’s serverless computing technologies and updates could reduce cloud service costs, improve scalability, and reduce developer and IT staff server configuration effort. However, some of the updates are in preview, and not all planned features are implemented.

Serverless Computing Enabled by Several Services

Serverless computing has gained popularity as applications are more often being implemented as assemblies of distributed, cloud-based services (such as microservices) and less often as monolithic implementations that handle all logic and infrastructure internally. For example, a Web application may call services deployed elsewhere to perform specific tasks, such as retrieving content, rendering images, and processing natural language input. The term “serverless” refers to the eliminated need for developers and IT staff to define the profiles and scale of servers where code runs, while paying for server usage only when applications call upon them to perform routines.