Serverless Computing Using Azure Functions: Build, Deploy, Automate, and Secure Serverless Application Development with Azure Functions

CHAPTER 1

Overview of Azure and Serverless Computing

The software industry wants to adopt a modern application development method by building and deploying software on the cloud. The cloud industry is continuously evolving around software development, deployment, security, reliability, and performance. How can we solve business problems with the cloud? How can we focus on adding business value by developing great software and delivering a great customer experience? You will get answers to these questions in this and subsequent chapters, so let's get started!

Structure

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

The evolution of cloud service platform

Getting to know Azure Cloud

Overview of Azure products and services

Introduction to Azure portal and regions

Overview of serverless computing

Objective

After studying this chapter, you should be able to:

Understand Azure, Azure Services, and Azure regions

Understand the serverless computing components

Set up your Azure subscriptions

The evolution of cloud service platforms

The cloud service platforms have evolved through various stages to the options, which we have today. The industry shifted from on-premises to cloud - IaaS and PaaS to meet their business requirements. Serverless is the latest and most promising option in this evolution.

On-Premises

Before the advent of the cloud, everything was on-premises. Organizations had to buy/rent their hardware and software licenses and run them in their own or rented datacentres. They had to deal with a multitude of questions - the number of servers, physical and network security handling, hardware failures, software patching, backups, managing the underlined infrastructures, and more. Essentially a lot of questions, not all of which might be directly related to running the business. For example, insurance would like to focus on their business, selling policies rather than managing the IT infrastructure. Similarly, a pharma company would like to focus on selling medicines.

Figure 1.1 shows the things organizations may have to worry about with on-premises systems:

Figure 1.1: On-Premise activities

Then came the cloud, and it provided relief from some of the challenges with the on-premises model.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

IaaS allowed utilizing servers hosted by the cloud service providers instead of hosting it yourself. While the worries around managing physical infrastructure were gone and it provides complete control to organizations, several questions still needed to be thought through:

How many virtual machines are needed currently?

How many virtual machines would be needed in the future when the usage increases?

How to monitors infrastructure and applications?

How to manage code deployment and various application dependencies, such as runtimes, and so on?

How to keep the latest security patches updated on servers?

This means that organizations cannot focus purely on their core business and not worry about IT infrastructure.

Figure 1.2 shows the reduced number of concerns organizations must worry about with IaaS:

Figure 1.2: Infrastructure as a Service activities

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

The cloud continued to grow and helped with these problems. With PaaS, there were even more simplifications. PaaS allows organizations to just worry about their business applications and let the cloud provider take care of the physical hardware, ongoing management of the environment like operating systems, virtual machines or containers, as well as the various application runtimes, whether it is Java Runtime, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python or others. The cloud provides configurable options and tools to monitor the resources on the portal.

Figure 1.3 shows even lesser concerns with PaaS:

Figure 1.3: Platform as a Service activities

PaaS has become very popular because of the ease of deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Moreover, cloud providers guarantee SLAs on uptime with PaaS offerings. However, they are still not completely free from thinking about how to scale their applications with business growth and more customers. This is limited to applications, but capacity planning must also be done to specify the number and size of the compute resources for the applications. The cost and volume have to be estimated.

Serverless

The latest evolution series is serverless, which provides even further abstraction from the underlying infrastructure. It allows organizations to focus on building the applications and making optimum use of them to achieve the best results for the business.

Serverless allows you to focus on your code and forget about the infrastructure.

Figure 1.4 suggests that all the questions are answered serverless:

Figure 1.4: Serverless Computing

Getting to know Azure Cloud

Microsoft Azure, commonly referred to as Azure, is a public, private, and hybrid cloud computing platform founded in the mid-2000s by Microsoft. Azure helps build, test, deploy, and manage software applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers located across the globe.

When you think about migrating an application to the cloud, you may have many questions, a lot of concerns about data management, data security, or how you will create and manage solutions. Azure takes care of these challenges.

While using Azure services like compute and data storage, you don't have to manage any hardware. You get rapid capabilities to expand data storage, data processing power, computation power, and any other kind of scale you need without investing capital in hardware.

In cloud computing, there is a different way that resources or cloud services can be provided in a cloud environment. Those ways are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) that can be used for services such as analytics, virtual computing, storage, networking, and much more.

The following figure 1.5 gives a glimpse of different cloud services:

Figure 1.5: Cloud Computing services

Infrastructure as a Service

Cloud infrastructure services are known as IaaS, where you get provided with highly scalable and automated compute resources to create your computing environment like your own data centers. You can create compute resources like virtual machines, operating systems, hard drives, storage space, networking, and IP addresses, and so on through virtualization technology.

Platform as a Service

PaaS provides an abstract virtualization platform with infrastructure resources to run your applications on top of it, and you are not managing any infrastructure components like virtual machines, storage, hardware. PaaS helps rapid software development, testing, and deployment.

Software as a Service

SaaS is an even higher level of abstraction. You need to subscribe to applications available over the internet and do not require client-side installation. SaaS applications are hosted on a remote server by third-party vendors.

Now, the question that comes to mind is who is using Azure? How is Azure helping their business to grow? Most of the Fortune 500 companies trust their business to run on Azure and enriching customer experience. We are going to understand the evolution of cloud service platforms in the next sections of this