What Is Azure Serverless Architecture and How Does It Work?

Oct 10

4 min read

Introduction:

Cloud computing has revolutionised the way businesses create, deploy, and support their applications. In the past, development teams had to take care of physical servers, set up operating systems, and provision infrastructure capacity before deploying applications. All these activities took time, money, and constant support. However, in the current world, serverless computing is an alternative that lets developers run their applications without managing the underlying servers directly. There are a number of serverless services provided by Microsoft Azure that enable businesses to automate their business processes, create applications, process data, and react to events. The services mentioned above are helpful for companies that wish to increase their efficiency and avoid managing infrastructure.

What Is Azure Serverless Architecture?

The Azure serverless architecture is a form of cloud computing whereby the cloud service provider is responsible for most of the infrastructure that is needed to run programs. Programmers only have to write the code, set up workflows, and integrate the various services, while Azure takes care of the infrastructure management depending on the service and hosting options chosen. The serverless architecture does not imply that the servers will not be used. What it implies is that programmers do not have to deal with the servers directly. To further know about it, one can visit Azure Online Training. Programs are capable of being triggered by events such as HTTP triggers, file triggers, time triggers, or message triggers from other systems. In an e-commerce system, serverless functions may be used to handle orders from customers.

Key Components of Azure Serverless Architecture:

There are various services provided by Azure, which can be combined to create serverless applications. Each service is responsible for handling a particular phase in the application lifecycle. To further know about it, one can visit the Azure Data Architect Certification. Here are the key components of Azure Serverless Architecture.

Azure Functions:

Azure Functions is an event-based computing service that runs code whenever a specific trigger occurs. This service can be used by developers for request processing, task scheduling, responding to messages, and other backend processing. For instance, one can use functions to automatically verify a document that was stored in cloud storage. This function can determine the type of the file, store information about the file, and start the next phase of processing. The scalability, execution limits and billing are dependent upon the configuration chosen for hosting.

Azure Logic Apps:

Azure Logic Apps allows organisations to create automated workflows and integrate applications by developing limited custom code. Azure Logic Apps offers a designer and connectors to work with different cloud services and business applications. For instance, Logic Apps may be used to automate the employee onboarding process. If a new employee entry is created, the process will alert the HR department, ask for approval, and perform other operations. The service will be especially useful in case the business process includes multiple applications or a number of different actions in a certain order.

Azure API Management:

API Management in Azure assists organisations in publishing, securing, monitoring, and managing application programming interfaces. It can offer controlled access to APIs connecting applications to serverless functions and backend services. Organisations can set up authentication, usage policies, monitoring of API usage, and manage access for API consumers. Such an approach will be especially helpful in case external applications should communicate with internal business systems.

Azure Storage and Messaging Services:

The storage and messaging solutions allow components in a serverless architecture to communicate and share data with each other. Azure Storage is able to store files and other application data, whereas Azure Service Bus allows for communication between different distributed systems. Azure Event Grid sends messages about an event to the appropriate services. For instance, a file upload may become an event, which triggers the work of Azure Function. It processes the file and sends a message to other services to do some more processing of the data.

How Does Azure Serverless Architecture Work?

A usual process of working within the serverless application is event-driven. Let us consider an application for processing documents in an insurance company. After the customer uploads the claim document, an event may trigger a function to validate the file. Then, it stores the results of processing the file and notifies the other service to proceed. Major IT hubs like Pune and Noida offer high-paying jobs for skilled professionals. Azure Classes in Pune can help you start a career in this domain. Each component has its specific purpose.

Step 1: Triggering/Event occurs. The user performs some actions like filling out the form or uploading a document using the application.
Step 2: The event is captured by Azure. The configured service captures the event and invokes the corresponding function/workflow.
Step 3: Application Logic occurs. It involves Azure Functions or any other service validating data, performing calculations, or communicating with other applications.
Step 4: Data is either processed or stored. Based on the requirements, the application can use Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, or Azure Storage to store data.
Step 5: The next step occurs. The output is either passed back to the system, a notification is sent, a message is published, or a new workflow is initiated.

Conclusion:

The serverless model of Azure makes it easier for companies to create event-driven applications without having to deal with the underlying infrastructure. With the help of Azure Functions, Logic Apps, API Management, storage services, and messaging services, organisations can automate their workflow, scale easily, and build applications. Major IT hubs like Pune and Noida offer job roles in this domain. Azure Training in Noida can help you start a career in this domain. It is important to know the various aspects of Azure Serverless in order to effectively utilise cloud technologies.