What are Azure Functions? - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] Before we describe what Azure Functions are, let's first understand the Evolution of Cloud Technologies. The Cloud has changed the way we design, develop, deploy and manage our server solutions. Different computing models emerged as a result of this democratization of the Cloud. Application hosting and execution platforms have evolved to offer highly and scalable, secure, flexible and lower cost computing options. First and foremost, we have the traditional on premises model, where we get full responsibility for hardware acquisition, installation, administration, management and technical support. Even though this model is still valid it's only recommended for particular scenarios. For instance, it would be a great choice for companies that have already invested in hardware or have regulatory compliance needs. Then we have IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service, which is the original Cloud computing model. In this case, the Cloud computing provider takes care of the fundamental computing infrastructure, but the administration, management and support are still your responsibilities. After Dev, Cloud platforms evolved in such a way to offer Platform as a service solution where not only the infrastructure is managed by the Cloud provider, but also the server services used to build solutions on. I'm pretty confident to say that this is the most common model nowadays. Finally, Serverless came about. This is a computing model and server architecture where the entire infrastructure is abstracted away. You don't have to worry about provisioning cover or managing the underlying operating system. It also offers the lowest cost due to its paper use nature. Understanding this evolution and knowing the differences between these models, will enable you to get the most out of the product and service options available at your fingertips. Now let's talk about Azure Functions. We can define Azure Functions as an on-demand serverless code that is completely managed for us. One of the most important features of Azure Functions is that they scale dynamically. Azure Functions support several programming languages such as C#, which we will use in this course, Java, JavaScript, Python, and a few others. Azure Functions need to be triggered to execute, and can be connected to different data sources and targets through bindings. Finally, the Azure Functions runtime and its related tools are both cross-platform and open source. This means that you can use any development environment you want, to build Azure Functions. I'm going to use Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 10 but you can install the Azure Functions tools on Mac OS or Linux and use your preferred code editor.