In November 2016, Microsoft officially announced the availability of Azure Functions. After the availability of this new service, the term ‘serverless computing’ became a true hype. Serverless computing basically means that developers can focus on developing instead of worrying about the server architecture because that is managed and controlled by the cloud provider. In this blog, I'll explain how you can use Azure Functions to execute small isolated work. Like I normally do I’ll do this based on an example application. To make it more interesting the solution is triggered by the Amsterdam Open Beacon Network and contain some interesting topics like Microsoft Cognitive Services and ReactJS. I’ll guide you through all of these topics one by one. Let’s start with a great initiative of the city of Amsterdam by placing beacons all over the city.

Amsterdam Open Beacon Network

In 2016 Amsterdam started a pilot by placing approximately 300 beacons all over the city. It’s not the first time Amsterdam is innovating and trying new technologies. For that reason, Amsterdam can be found back in the top 20 of the 2016/2017 ‘Innovation Cities’ index. The main goal of this initiative is to improve navigation through the city and the accessibility and findability of city highlights. Beacons are small devices that can broadcast messages by using Bluetooth Low Energy. Devices like smartphones and smartwatches can listen to these messages.

Let me give you an example of a real-life solution. Every year Amsterdam is organizing ‘Museumnacht’ which give free access to everybody for one night to every museum. The company behind this event, N8, developed an app that provides information about the participating museums, but also real-time insights into the current number of visitors in each museum. You can probably imagine that a free event will attract a lot of people and that means long queues. The idea of this app is to divide visitors over the participating museums in order to prevent long queues. Several beacons are placed in the museum. The installed app registers when a user enters a museum by listening to messages broadcasted by beacons. The same thing happens when a user leaves a museum. Visitors can consult the app to see how many visitors are in a museum and by doing that they can choose to go to a museum that is less crowded.