Overview

Azure Functions

Stacks785

Followers705

Votes62

Serverless

Stacks2.2K

Followers1.2K

Votes28

GitHub Stars46.9K

Forks5.7K

Azure Functions vs Serverless: What are the differences?

Introduction Azure Functions and Serverless are two popular cloud computing platforms that provide the ability to run code in response to events without the need for managing infrastructure. While both Azure Functions and Serverless offer similar functionality, there are several key differences between the two.

Deployment Environment: Azure Functions is a service provided by Microsoft Azure, while Serverless is a framework that can be used with various cloud providers including Azure. This means that Azure Functions is tightly integrated with Azure's infrastructure, while Serverless provides a more agnostic approach, allowing developers to use it across multiple cloud platforms.
Supported Languages: Azure Functions offers support for multiple programming languages, including C#, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python. In contrast, Serverless has broader language support and can be used with languages such as Node.js, Python, Java, C#, Ruby, Go, and more. Serverless offers a wider range of choices for developers in terms of programming languages.
Scalability: Both Azure Functions and Serverless are designed to provide automatic scalability. However, Azure Functions scales on a per-function basis, which means that each function can scale independently based on its specific workload. Serverless, on the other hand, scales at the service level, allowing multiple functions within the service to scale together. This can provide more efficient scaling in situations where multiple functions share similar resource requirements.
Pricing Model: Azure Functions pricing is based on the consumption plan, where users are billed for the resources used during the execution of their functions. On the other hand, Serverless offers more flexibility in pricing options, allowing users to choose between on-demand pricing or reserved capacity pricing. This gives users the ability to optimize costs based on their specific usage patterns.
Extensibility: Azure Functions allows developers to extend the platform by creating custom bindings and triggers. These custom extensions can be used to integrate with external services and resources. Serverless also supports extensibility through plugins, which can be used to add functionality and integrations with various services. However, Serverless has a larger and more active community of plugin developers, providing a wider range of options for extending the platform.
Vendor Lock-in: Both Azure Functions and Serverless provide some level of vendor lock-in as they are both cloud platform-specific. However, Serverless offers more flexibility in terms of deployment options, allowing developers to switch between different cloud providers more easily. Azure Functions, being a service provided by Microsoft Azure, ties users more closely to the Azure ecosystem.

In Summary, Azure Functions and Serverless offer similar functionality in terms of running code in response to events, but differ in deployment environment, supported languages, scalability model, pricing, extensibility options, and level of vendor lock-in. The choice between the two platforms depends on specific requirements such as language preferences, desired scalability model, pricing flexibility, and integration needs.

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Advice on Azure Functions, Serverless

Tim

CTO at Checkly Inc.

Sep 18, 2019

Needs adviceon

Heroku

AWS Lambda

When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:

Developer Experience trumps everything.
AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.

The setup

Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:

Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
Heroku
Lambda

It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?

I chopped that question up into the following categories:

Developer Experience / DX 🤓
Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
Cost 💵
Lock in 🔐

Read the full post linked below for all details

357k views357k

Comments

Mark

Nov 2, 2020

Needs adviceon

Microsoft Azure

Need advice on what platform, systems and tools to use.

Evaluating whether to start a new digital business for which we will need to build a website that handles all traffic. Website only right now. May add smartphone apps later. No desktop app will ever be added. Website to serve various countries and languages. B2B and B2C type customers. Need to handle heavy traffic, be low cost, and scale well.

We are open to either build it on AWS or on Microsoft Azure.

Apologies if I'm leaving out some info. My first post. :) Thanks in advance!

133k views133k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Azure Functions	Serverless
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.	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.
Easily schedule event-driven tasks across services;Expose Functions as HTTP API endpoints;Scale Functions based on customer demand;Develop how you want, using a browser-based UI or existing tools;Get continuous deployment, remote debugging, and authentication out of the box	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 46.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 5.7K
Stacks 785	Stacks 2.2K
Followers 705	Followers 1.2K
Votes 62	Votes 28
Pros & Cons
Pros 14 Pay only when invoked 11 Great developer experience for C# 9 Multiple languages supported 7 Great debugging support 5 Can be used as lightweight https service Cons 1 No persistent (writable) file system available 1 Poor support for Linux environments 1 Sporadic server & language runtime issues 1 Not suited for long-running applications	Pros 14 API integration 7 Supports cloud functions for Google, Azure, and IBM 3 Lower cost 1 5. Built-in Redundancy and Availability: 1 3. Simplified Management for developers to focus on cod
Integrations
Azure DevOps Java Bitbucket Node.js Microsoft Azure GitHub Visual Studio Code JavaScript Azure Cosmos DB C#	AWS Lambda Amazon API Gateway

What are some alternatives to Azure Functions, Serverless?

AWS Lambda

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.

Google Cloud Run

A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management.

Google Cloud Functions

Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running

Knative

Knative provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center

OpenFaaS

Serverless Functions Made Simple for Docker and Kubernetes

Nuclio

nuclio is portable across IoT devices, laptops, on-premises datacenters and cloud deployments, eliminating cloud lock-ins and enabling hybrid solutions.

Apache OpenWhisk

OpenWhisk is an open source serverless platform. It is enterprise grade and accessible to all developers thanks to its superior programming model and tooling. It powers IBM Cloud Functions, Adobe I/O Runtime, Naver, Nimbella among others.

Cloud Functions for Firebase

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.

AWS Batch

It enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. It dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted.

Fission

Write short-lived functions in any language, and map them to HTTP requests (or other event triggers). Deploy functions instantly with one command. There are no containers to build, and no Docker registries to manage.