In the past year, I’ve inadvertently made a massive shift in my career trajectory. After nearly twenty years living in the Windows Server “platforms” side of the Microsoft universe, I kinda-sorta-guess that I’ve pivoted to an ever-changing amalgamation of being a systems architect, systems integrator, data analyst and aspiring data scientist. I know that may sound confusing, but I’d be lying if I said that my recent path wasn’t just as bewildering.

“Sometimes I’ll start a sentence, and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way. Like an improv conversation. An improversation.“ Michael Gary Scott, Manager Extraordinaire

I didn’t set out to make a transition, and truthfully I didn’t even recognize it as it was happening. Nor can I point to a single moment of when it happened — but I can with certainty point to the product that kick-started it all: Microsoft Flow. Last year I was asked by a longtime friend to take a leap and join him in my current role, and in helping him solve a lingering data sync issue he had faced for two years, I lucked out and dove headfirst into the great serverless unknown by dipping my toes into the water with Flow.

What is Serverless?

Serverless compute can be thought of as a function as a service (FaaS), or a microservice that is hosted on a cloud platform. Business logic runs as stand alone or ad hoc functions which means that you don’t have to manually provision or scale infrastructure.

Serverless allows you to create apps and platforms without the need of servers, instead you can use on-demand and auto-scaling Azure serverless platforms to do the job. And Microsoft’s serverless offerings come in two flavors, design-first and code-first varieties.

Design First

Microsoft Flow is a Design First development solution from Microsoft that is part of it’s Power Platform suite of products, which are at the heart of their Codeless and Serverless DevOps initiatives. Azure Logic Apps, which you can think of as Flow on steroids, and PowerApps round out the design-first vision. Microsoft’s documentation describes their Design-first technologies like so:

When business analysts discuss and plan a business process, they may draw a flow diagram on paper. With Logic Apps and Microsoft Flow, you can take a similar approach to designing a workflow. They both include user interfaces in which you can draw out the workflow. We call this approach a design-first approach.

Microsoft Flow, PowerApps and Azure Logic Apps are the perfect introduction to the power and possibilities of the serverless Microsoft Cloud — and before you know it you’ll be rethinking your entire workflow, ever-expanding the reach and complexity of your designs. If you’ve ever built a process flow in Visio, or a SharePoint workflow, you’ll be right at home in the design first realm.

To discover more, the Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals learning path at Microsoft Learn is a great place to start your design-first journey.

Code First

If you are an experienced developer you may want to take the training wheels off and start out jumping in to Microsoft’s code first solutions, which are Azure App Service WebJobs and Azure Functions respectively. Microsoft’s documentation describes their Code-first technologies like so:

The developers on your team will likely prefer to write code when they want to orchestrate and integrate different business applications into a single workflow. This is the case when you need more control over the performance of your workflow or need to write custom code as part of the business process.

Many of the limitations that may encumber you with the design-first solutions quickly fall by the wayside when you opt to go code-first. Azure Functions for example, can be written in C#, F#, JavaScript, Java and Python, and can be triggered and called in countless ways within the platform. They can be nested, and call outside data sources, or implement API calls, the list goes on. There really is no limit to what they can do.

To get started, the Create serverless applications learning path at Microsoft learn outlines most of the ways you can harness the power of serverless.

Why Serverless?

The overall goal for Microsoft’s groundbreaking Power Platform and serverless cloud offerings is to democratize and revolutionize business applications and process development by empowering “citizen developers.” Microsoft is fully aware that enterprise technology teams move slowly, and in an effort to accelerate process and application evolution they are building tools that let anyone develop solutions to help streamline efforts.

The real beauty and power of Microsoft’s new serverless vision is the versatility and agility of the solutions that you can develop. You can begin your citizen developer journey slowly as I did, starting a design first approach by creating basic Flows. You could then expand your knowledge by developing a front end for your processes using PowerApps, and even extend it further to Dynamics 365 by utilizing Business Process Flows. It is up to you.

How to Choose a Serverless Service

While the possibilities in this design-first world aren’t endless, they are plentiful and they do the job for most. However, if you want to unlock truly limitless potential, have a go at the code-first offerings. After you use and understand the technologies, you’ll begin to rethink how you’ve been doing things in the past.

With serverless, you can quickly build ad hoc and modular applications, systems and microservices that scale in breadth and complexity as you see fit. It is a true one size fits all platform, which means the more familiar you are with it, the more uses you’ll find for it.

Accessibility is the Differentiator

If you have no development experience, this may all sound daunting, but trust me, it’s not. I am not a developer, and I’d never call myself one. In fact, until about a year ago the extent of my development experience was hacking together VB, C# and PowerShell scripts as best I could to perform basic Windows Server Administration duties. My first Flow was from a simple Create an item in a SharePoint for a selected Excel Online row community template, and after I was able to get it to work I was hooked!

Microsoft’s vision for the future is here.

It is crazy for me to think that just a year ago, I knew nothing about Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, Power BI, Dynamics 365, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, Logic Apps or any of the other technologies at the center of Microsoft’s serverless future — but now I choose to eat, sleep and breath them. Why? Because understanding their power and possibilities has made what I’ve learned in the past year more valuable to me than my previous twenty years of enterprise IT experience combined.

If I can do it, anyone can.

No, that’s not hyperbole, I am dead serious. I have full and complete faith in the Azure serverless future and I’m willing to stake my career on it. I, a novice developer at best, have designed and developed highly complex and wide accessing, and data heavy infrastructure platforms and services that would rival tools, applications and platforms tens of thousands of development hours in the making — all with no real development knowledge and armed only with the power of Microsoft’s serverless cloud platform.

I am truly empowered with the Power Platform and Azure serverless in my arsenal.

Start small, think big.

With the serverless approach, you can make your solutions as complex, or as simple as you’d like — there is no right or wrong way. You can create them from drag and drop interfaces, or dive deep into the code, or mix and match if you’d like — and the beauty is that the Azure serverless offerings support a multitude of languages, platforms and technologies. As it is a part of Azure, it is an open platform with countless connectors and services that you can pick and choose to use to your heart’s content.

For me, the key to my success with serverless was to free my mind, and to forget everything I thought I knew about architecting and developing a software platform or solution. Serverless can adapt to whatever you need it to be, rather than a traditional app or platform forcing you to adapt to it. Once you know the true power of serverless, when you are approached to solve a problem or develop a solution, you’ll likely begin to think serverless first… and when you do, you’ll truly be free. If I can do it, anyone can.

“Be water my friend.” — Bruce Lee

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like Flow… When you put Flow into an app, it becomes the app. You put Flow into the process, it becomes the process. When you put Flow in the hands of your users, it becomes the users. Now users can Flow, or they can crash. Be Flow, my friends.

The Future is Bright for the Microsoft Cloud

Finally, last week Microsoft shocked analysts and the industry with their latest quarterly earnings report, with massive growth in the Azure Cloud and Office 365 driving their more than $33 billion in revenue for the quarter. The Power Platform lives in their Office 365 commercial group, which saw a 28% increase in revenue, while Azure, which is home to Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions saw an astounding revenue increase by 63% (source).

MSFT continues to outperform their competition.

Hot on the heels of their quarterly earnings call, the Department of Defense announced Microsoft as the winner of their coveted ten year, $10 billion dollar JEDI Cloud contract over rival Amazon AWS. It is safe to say, that beyond the monetary gains of the contract, Microsoft is sure to receive a massive amount of prestige and clout that comes along with winning a major DoD contact. Also, as the DoD goes, so do many of their major contractors and partners. Look for ever bigger earnings next quarter.

Microsoft embraces the force with JEDI.

All of this goes to show that by nearly ever financial and growth metric, Microsoft Cloud is here to stay — so one should sleep soundly betting their future on it. I know I do.

If you’d like to learn more about the Microsoft Power Platform, and their serverless offerings, check out their many great learning paths and modules at Microsoft Learn. Also, be sure to check out the Microsoft Flow, PowerApps and Power BI user communities. I went from a nobody to a Flownaut in the Microsoft community in a matter of months, and you can to!

I am a Flownaut, yet I have no idea what I am doing!

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below or shoot me a message on Twitter @BradGroux. Until then, be water my friends.