Serverless

After we moved one workload out of Azure Functions, a reasonable question came up. Why not move everything? The answer was simple. Some things were still working exactly as intended. Serverless did not fail us. We just learned where it fit. Not All Functions Are Equal One of the easiest mistakes to make with Azure Functions is treating them as interchangeable units. They are not. Some functions want to be long lived. Some want tight performance guarantees. Some want deep observability. ...

Functions seemed like the obvious choice. Until we hit the constraints that Container App Jobs do not have. Functions Work Until They Do Not We started with Azure Functions for our batch workloads. The model is simple: write code deploy it trigger it on a schedule or event It worked well for small jobs. Then we needed longer execution times. Functions have limits. We needed custom dependencies. The runtime felt restrictive. ...

Azure Functions are often introduced as the simplest way to run code in Azure. You write a function. Azure handles the rest. For a while, that is true. Then, at some point, Functions stop feeling serverless. They start feeling like infrastructure. The Early Days Feel Magical Early on, Azure Functions are hard to beat. No servers to manage Easy triggers Automatic scaling Minimal deployment overhead They are especially attractive for: ...

For a long time, this Azure Function felt like a success story. It was small. It was event-driven. It scaled automatically. On paper, it was exactly the kind of workload serverless is built for. Eventually, we moved it out of serverless anyway. Not because it was broken. Because it stopped being the right fit. The Function That Kept Growing The function started simple. It processed inbound data, did some validation, and pushed results downstream. Execution time was short. Volume was low. Failures were rare. ...

Introduction Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to run containerized applications without worrying about orchestration. In this guide, I’ll walk you through deploying your first container app. Prerequisites Before we begin, make sure you have: An active Azure subscription Azure CLI installed (az --version to check) Docker installed locally Basic knowledge of containers Creating Your First Container App Step 1: Set Up Your Environment First, let’s create a resource group and a Container Apps environment: ...