- Welcome to Azure Essentials.
In the next few minutes we'll explore
your serverless options in Azure
including Azure Functions, Logic Apps,
and Azure Event Grid as the core services.
These services are designed for on-demand scale
without having to plan for or manage the infrastructure
required to run your apps.
With serverless, you can publish your code
using Azure Functions,
build workflows and integrate with other services
via Logic Apps and trigger your code via Event Grid.
And all of this happens without the need
for idle resources between events.
In terms of efficiency and utilization,
serverless is the evolution of application platforms
and provides the most abstraction
from the underlying compute resources
required to run apps and services.
Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS,
in many cases replicates the servers,
apps, and networking you'd run on premises
and moves those components to the cloud.
So you still need to architect and maintain each resource.
Platform as a Service, or PaaS, takes that a step further
by keeping those underlying services available,
performing, and up to date.
But you still need to consider resource sizing,
scaling, and how to optimize resource utilization.
With serverless the underlying resources
are spun up instantly, using events.
So your code, logic, and integration
is all you need to define.
The serverless platform takes care of the rest.
And micro billing means you're only charged
per operation or event.
So let's explore the core services
that comprise the serverless platform in Azure.
First, Azure functions, think of this
as specifying what to run.
The service is designed to allow you to run a piece of code
in response to a variety of events.
These are typically small pieces of code
and can be written in a development language of your choice,
such as C#, F#, Node.js, or Java.
Azure Functions are great for processing data,
integrating systems, building IoT solutions,
and constructing simple APIs and microservices.
You can use functions for tasks like image or to processing,
file maintenance, or for any task
that you want to run on a schedule.
Azure Functions also integrate
with various Azure and third-party services.
These services can trigger a function and start execution,
or they can service input and output for your code.
Next, Logic Apps, think of this as specifying
the process steps for how to run your serverless apps.
Logic Apps extend what you can do with Azure Functions
by adding workflow and prebuilt integration
and activity hooks to other services.
It helps you build, schedule,
and automate processes as workflows,
so you can integrate apps, data, systems, and services
across enterprises or organizations.
You can build your Logic Apps visually
with the Logic Apps designer,
available in the Azure portal through your browser,
and then Visual Studio.
Alternatively, you can create or edit Logic App
definitions using JSON or Azure Powershell commands
and Azure Resource Manager templates for select tasks.
There are around 200 built-in connectors
such as SQL Database, Azure services, Office 365,
Salesforce, SAP, and more.
These connectors provide triggers,
actions, or both for creating Logic Apps
that securely access and process data in real time.
You can also build custom connectors
to programmatically connect to your apps and services.
Every Logic App workflow starts with a trigger,
which fires when a specific event happens
or when new available data meets specific criteria.
Triggers can include basic scheduling capabilities
so that you can specify how frequently your workflow runs.
Each time the trigger fires the Logic Apps engine
creates a Logic App instance that
runs the workflow's actions.
These actions can also include data conversions
and flow control such as conditional statements,
switch statements, loops, and branching.
Lastly, Azure Event Grid.
You can think of this as specifying
when to run your serverless infrastructure.
While scheduling and polling
your options with serverless apps,
each time your functions or Logic Apps are polled
to check for an activity it will incur a cost.
To solve for this an to make the event discovery
more efficient eventing using Azure Event Grid
eliminates the need for scheduled polling
and can serve as a trigger or event
to execute your code and workflows.
Azure Event Grid allows you to easily build
applications with event-based architectures.
With it, you select the Azure resource
you'd like to subscribe to,
then define the event handler to send the event to.
Both Azure Functions and Logic Apps
have built-in support to handle events
coming from the Event Grid.
Event Grid also works natively with events
generated by other Azure services
like storage blobs and resource groups
and has customization options
for application and third-party events
using defined event sources, custom topics,
which are event sources, send events, and custom web hooks.
Azure Event Grid is a great option
for building serverless apps,
automating infrastructure ops,
and integrating your apps and microservices through events.
So that was a quick run-through of a few core options
for building serverless apps in Azure.
Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Grid
are fully managed by Azure.
So you don't have to worry about building,
hosting, scaling, managing, monitoring,
and maintaining the infrastructure to power your solutions.
These services automatically scale
to meet your needs, make integrations faster,
and help you build cloud apps with minimal code.
With serverless you pay only for what you use,
making it especially valuable in cases where operations
are sporadic or unpredictable.
To learn more, please check out the link shown,
and you can learn all about your options
for building and running your apps,
some workloads in Azure by following
the related topics on Azure Essentials.
Thanks for watching.
(light music)