Conclusion

In this book we’ve seen various serverless offerings in Azure. With Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps, we can run some code or workflow, triggered by various events, and we’re only charged when the application runs. Service Bus offers queues and topics, which allows for decoupled and highly scalable applications. Event Grid offers subscriptions, topics, and domains, which allow for highly scalable, event-driven applications. All these services work well together. For example, all of these can connect with Service Bus, and Event Grid can send events to any of these services.

The Azure SQL and API Management serverless offerings are the odd ones out. They don’t offer the cross-compatibility that the other services offer, and you’ll always need to pay for your storage. These services weren’t built to be serverless, but serverless tiers were added to them much later.

If you need to churn out CPU or memory 24/7, non-serverless resources are always the cheaper choice, if they are available. Yet, with the right use case, serverless is a potentially cheap and powerful tool in your toolbox.

In this book, I’ve wanted to give you better insight into serverless computing. Most blogs and articles don’t get past a basic Azure Functions example, but serverless is more than that. There are other services that offer pay-per-use subscriptions, such as Azure Cognitive Services and Serverless Kubernetes, and more serverless services are being added. Hopefully, this book gave you the tools and insights to use them in your own applications.