Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.
Azure Functions is a tool in the Serverless category of a tech stack.
What are some alternatives to Azure Functions?
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.
Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running
Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you create functions that are triggered by Firebase products, such as changes to data in the Realtime Database, uploads to Cloud Storage, new user sign ups via Authentication, and conversion events in Analytics.
Azure Cosmos DB, Serverless, Azure Bot Service, Azure DevOps, Java and 7 more are some of the popular tools that integrate with Azure Functions. Here's a list of all 12 tools that integrate with Azure Functions.