The new era of serverless computing is making the traditional approach of building and deploying web applications seem outdated. Major cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are pushing their serverless computing services forward owing to their many business benefits.
In their The State of Serverless report of 2022, Datadog describes how serverless has become mainstream, with over 50% of companies adopting it.
In this article, we’ll look at the powerful serverless offering of Azure and the incredible transformations and advantages it brings to the table. But before that, let’s understand what “serverless” means.
What Does Serverless Mean?
As the name suggests, serverless is a cloud-native development model that allows a quick and simple approach to creating and deploying applications without the server headache. With serverless, the developers have more time to focus on enhancing the business logic rather than investing time in managing servers.
The servers are not entirely absent, though. The cloud service provider manages them, and businesses only pay for the resources used. This way, developers do not have to worry about fault tolerance, applying security patches for around-the-clock maintenance, optimization, etc.
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are the three leading cloud service providers offering serverless computing. For this article, we’ll be looking at Azure’s serverless offering and its many benefits.
Azure Serverless Explained
Azure, one of the significant achievements of Microsoft in the cloud-computing domain, was launched in 2010 and has since proven to be an excellent public cloud computing platform for building and deploying serverless applications or executing functions without setting up a server.
Azure offers fully-managed solutions that can save time and operational costs so that there’s room for more innovation and continuous business growth.
Here are some of its outstanding features:
- Built-in intelligence where developers can run code in any programming language.
- Faster deployments and rapid go-to-market with its exclusive Azure Functions, a serverless computing tool.
- A rich set of tools for debugging and monitoring.
- Faster setting up of CI/CD pipelines with its DevOps tools.
Let’s dive into the key benefits of going serverless with Azure:
1. Increased Team Efficiency and Performance
Due to Azure’s end-to-end offering, enterprises can expect more productivity and performance from the team. With Azure serverless, there’s no more provisioning, load balancing, or maintenance done by the developers; these are Azure’s responsibilities.
As such, businesses see a massive boost in the team’s performance as there’s more time and resources to optimize core business logic and algorithms. There is also less room for errors as Azure offers proactive monitoring and analysis tools.
2. Lesser Costs
Azure allows payment to be made based on resources used, and the idle time is not accounted for. It follows the cost-saving pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Thus, there are zero operational costs while using Azure from the business side, and you pay only for the resources used by your app, such as workloads, tools, number of executions or functions, etc.
3. More Scope for Innovation
Azure enables faster time-to-market and offers scope for more and more innovation opportunities. It minimizes the risks associated with deployment as there are plenty of intelligent analytics tools businesses can use to proactively monitor and rectify potential bottlenecks.
It also manages security, auto-upgrades, and threat protection and keeps such infrastructure-related concerns out of the developers’ schedule.
4. A Wide Range of Tools for Computation, Development, Database, and More
Azure’s serverless offerings are an all-inclusive solution for efficiently deploying apps.
It offers computation services such as serverless functions and Kubernetes, where users can deploy code in their preferred programming language and scale on-demand. Development methodologies such as CI/CD or DevOps tools can be used for smoother pipeline execution, debugging, and delivery.
The Azure Serverless Database, Azure Cosmos DB, supports app scalability with its multi-model database service.
5. Higher Reliability and Scalability
With serverless, the cloud service provider is responsible for handling sudden changes in server load. Similarly, Azure lets enterprises build scalable apps rapidly while scaling according to their needs.
And what makes an application reliable? A thoroughly tested app with the ability to bounce back quickly from an unexpected crash or system failure. With Azure, businesses can ensure their mission-critical applications are built to be resilient and reliable.
The Bottom Line
Serverless has grown in popularity over the last decade. And Azure’s unique development model and a wide array of tools take care of almost every development aspect from start to finish.
zCon offers enterprise-grade cloud development solutions with the power of Azure. Want to know if your business going serverless with Azure is the right call? Reach out to our cloud experts today!
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