Azure’s Serverless offerings allow developers to build and deploy elastic-scale applications faster than ever. Serverless technology allows developers to focus on their apps rather than provisioning, managing, and scaling the underlying infrastructure. Azure provides unique serverless tools to accelerate development by seamlessly tapping into the benefits of the cloud.

See a quick overview here:

Traditionally, writing a new application couldn’t begin until a few fundamental questions had been answered regarding the infrastructure - Where will this app run? How will this app scale to meet demand? How can I monitor my app? These and many similar questions, take a significant portion of development and operations investment. Developers like to write code and businesses like to focus on their business problems. Azure Serverless enables just that by abstracting the infrastructure and making only the app code and business logic central.

Azure Serverless platform provides a series of fully managed services ranging from compute, storage, database, orchestration, monitoring, analytics, intelligence, and so on to help construct serverless applications for any kind of scenario. In this blog post, we focus on two pieces central to serverless application development, Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps.

Azure Functions provide Functions-as-a-Service, where you simply provide your code (whether C#, JavaScript, Python, or many other supported languages) and it executes on demand. Azure Functions can be authored and debugged locally on a developer’s machine and can stream data in and out of other services like Azure Storage, Event Hubs, etc. through a unique concept called bindings. Functions scale to meet the application needs automatically, so a Function that runs successfully locally will automatically scale up to potentially process billions of events in the cloud.

Azure Logic Apps provide serverless workflows in the cloud. For example, if you think of an operation like adding a new customer, there may be several pieces of functionality to execute. You may need to add the customer to a database, generate a welcome email, create a new user login, and create an entry in CRM. Logic Apps allows orchestration of data and processing to bring these isolated steps into a coherent workflow. Logic Apps comes with over 150 connectors to services like Visual Studio Team Services, Salesforce, SAP, and many others. This allows developers to easily integrate data in and out of their serverless apps instead of writing complex glue-code between disparate systems. Logic Apps also allow you to orchestrate and connect the Functions and APIs of your application together.

Azure Serverless platform provides an easy to use canvas to build virtually any kind of cloud application by easily bringing together IoT, data processing, automation, messaging, and intelligence with greater agility and power in delivering end-to-end solutions. For example, First Gas recently completed a complex application with Dynamics 365 and SAP in only 4 months. The Chief Information Officer expressed that without Serverless “…there’s no way we would have accomplished this level of integration in four months.”

Check out the video above for a demo of serverless tools in Azure, and be sure to try out some of the Serverless quickstarts to get your first serverless app built in a matter of minutes.