Choose the best Azure serverless technology for your business scenario

Introduction

Serverless computing is a term used to describe an execution environment that's set up and managed for you. You merely specify what you want to happen by writing code or connecting and configuring components in a visual editor, and then specify the actions that trigger your functionality, such as a timer or an HTTP request. Best of all, you never have to worry about an outage, your code can scale instantly to meet demand, and you pay based only on the actual usage of your code.

Tailwind Traders, a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer, has found success selling online. The company sees several opportunities to improve its e-commerce website. For example, it wants to provide more accurate real-time inventory information online to customers who want to visit their local store to purchase an item. The company also wants to respond more proactively to customers who've had a negative experience by providing a new customer-retention program.

Tailwind Traders suspects that serverless computing can help it provide these services, but it needs help to understand which Azure solutions are right for its business scenarios.

In this module, you'll learn about two serverless computing solutions on Azure: Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps. You'll learn what they are, how they differ, and when you should choose one over the other.

Identify the product options

 

Serverless computing is a cloud-hosted execution environment that runs your code but abstracts the underlying hosting environment. The term serverless computing is a misnomer. After all, there is a server (or a group of servers) that executes your code or desired functionality.

The key idea is that you're not responsible for setting up or maintaining the server. You don't have to worry about scaling it when there's increased demand, and you don't have to worry about outages. The cloud vendor takes care of all maintenance and scaling concerns for you.

You create an instance of the service, and you add your code. No infrastructure configuration or maintenance is required, or even allowed. You configure your serverless apps to respond to events. An event could be a REST endpoint, a periodic timer, or even a message received from another Azure service. The serverless app runs only when it's triggered by an event. Scaling and performance are handled automatically, and you're billed only for the resources you use. You don't even need to reserve resources.

Serverless computing is ordinarily used to handle back-end scenarios. In other words, serverless computing is responsible for sending message from one system to another, or processing messages that were sent from other systems. It's not used for user-facing systems but, rather, it works in the background.

In this module, we'll cover two Azure serverless computing services: Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps.

Azure Functions

With the Azure Functions service, you can host a single method or function by using a popular programming language in the cloud that runs in response to an event. An example of an event might be an HTTP request, a new message on a queue, or a message on a timer.

Because of its atomic nature, Azure Functions can serve many purposes in an application's design. Functions can be written in many common programming languages, such as C#, Python, JavaScript, Typescript, Java, and PowerShell.

Azure Functions scales automatically, and charges accrue only when a function is triggered. These qualities make Azure Functions a solid choice when demand is variable. For example, you might be receiving messages from an IoT solution that monitors a fleet of delivery vehicles. You'll likely have more data arriving during business hours. Azure Functions can scale out to accommodate these busier times.

An Azure function is a stateless environment. A function behaves as if it's restarted every time it responds to an event. This feature is ideal for processing incoming data. And if state is required, the function can be connected to an Azure storage account.

Azure Functions can perform orchestration tasks by using an extension called Durable Functions, which allows developers to chain functions together while maintaining state.

The Azure Functions solution is ideal when you're concerned only with the code that's running your service and not the underlying platform or infrastructure. You use Functions most commonly when you need to perform work in response to an event. You do this often via a REST request, timer, or message from another Azure service, and when that work can be completed quickly, within seconds or less.

Azure Logic Apps

Logic Apps is a low-code/no-code development platform hosted as a cloud service. The service helps you automate and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need to integrate apps, data, systems, and services across enterprises or organizations. Logic Apps simplifies how you design and build scalable solutions, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or both. This solution covers app integration, data integration, system integration, enterprise application integration (EAI), and business-to-business (B2B) integration.

Azure Logic Apps is designed in a web-based designer and can execute logic that's triggered by Azure services without you having to write any code. You build an app by linking triggers to actions with connectors. A trigger is an event, such as a timer, that causes an app to execute, a new message to be sent to a queue, or an HTTP request. An action is a task or step that can execute. There are logic actions such as those you would find in most programming languages. Examples of actions include working with variables, decision statements and loops, and tasks that parse and modify data.

To build enterprise integration solutions with Azure Logic Apps, you can choose from a growing gallery of over 200 connectors. The gallery includes services such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle DB, and file shares.

If you can't find the action or connector you need, you can build your own by using custom code.

What are the differences between these services?

You can call Azure Functions from Azure Logic Apps, and vice versa. The primary difference between the two services is their intent. Azure Functions is a serverless compute service, and Azure Logic Apps is intended to be a serverless orchestration service. Although you can use Azure Functions to orchestrate a long-running business process that involves various connections, this was not its primary use case when it was designed.

Additionally, the two services are priced differently. Azure Functions pricing is based on the number of executions and the running time of each execution. Logic Apps pricing is based on the number of executions and the type of connectors that it utilizes.

Analyze the decision criteria

With two viable serverless options, it can be difficult to know which is the best one for the job. In this unit, we'll analyze the criteria that experts employ when they're choosing a serverless service to use for a given business need. Understanding the criteria can also help you better understand the nuanced differences between the products.

Do you need to perform an orchestration across well-known APIs?

As we noted previously, Azure Logic Apps was designed with orchestration in mind, from the web-based visual configurator to the pricing model. Logic Apps excels at connecting a large array of disparate services via their APIs to pass and process data through many steps in a workflow.

It's possible to create the same workflow by using Azure Functions, but it might take a considerable amount of time to research which APIs to call and how to call them. Azure Logic Apps has already componentized these API calls so that you supply only a few details and the details of calling the necessary APIs is abstracted away.

Do you need to execute custom algorithms or perform specialized data parsing and data lookups?

With Azure Functions, you can use the full expressiveness of a programming language in a compact form. This lets you concisely build complex algorithms, or data lookup and parsing operations. You would be responsible for maintaining the code, handling exceptions resiliently, and so on.

Although Azure Logic Apps can perform logic (loops, decisions, and so on), if you have a logic-intensive orchestration that requires a complex algorithm, implementing that algorithm might be more verbose and visually overwhelming.

Do you have existing automated tasks written in an imperative programming language?

If you already have your orchestration or business logic expressed in C#, Java, Python, or another popular programming language, it might be easier to port your code into the body of an Azure Functions function app than to re-create it by using Azure Logic Apps.

Do you prefer a visual (declarative) workflow or writing (imperative) code?

Ultimately, your choice comes down to whether you prefer to work in a declarative environment or an imperative environment. Developers who have expertise in an imperative programming language might prefer to think about automation and orchestration from an imperative mindset. IT professionals and business analysts might prefer to work in a more visual low-code/no-code (declarative) environment.

Use Azure Functions

Data about each product that's sold at Tailwind Traders is packaged as a JSON message and sent to an event hub. The event hub distributes the JSON message to subscribers, which allows various systems to be notified.

Tailwind Traders wants to upgrade its e-commerce site to include real-time inventory tracking. Currently, the website updates product availability nightly at 2:00 AM. A Windows service that's written in C# contains all of the necessary logic to:

• Retrieve the messages.
• Parse the JSON.
• Perform a lookup across multiple databases to find additional product information.
• Potentially, send notifications to the purchasing department so that they can reorder quantities that fall below certain levels.

The Windows service runs in a virtual machine that's hosted on Azure.

Most of the time, this system works fine. However, some products are in high demand, and some products are kept in low quantities at each store. Several times a day, customers drive to a store to pick up an item only to find that it's no longer in stock.

Instead of running the algorithm nightly, the company wants to run the inventory updater each time a product is purchased.

Which service should you choose?

Because the Tailwind Traders developers team has already written the logic in C#, it would make sense to copy the relevant C# code from the Windows service and port it to an Azure function. The developers would bind the function to trigger each time a new message appears on a specific queue.

Why not choose Azure Logic Apps?

It's possible to implement the same logic in Azure Logic Apps. However, because the team has already invested time in building the service in C#, it can use the same code in an Azure function.

Summary

Our goal in this module was to help Tailwind Traders explore several monitoring service offerings from Azure to apply to a variety of business scenarios.

We identified three product options and their capabilities: Azure Advisor, Azure Monitor, and Azure Service Health. We analyzed decision criteria for choosing one option over another for certain scenarios. Then we applied those decision criteria to three different challenges faced by Tailwind Traders, helping them find the best service option for the scenario.

Without monitoring services, Tailwind Traders would spend more money on its cloud environment, be unsure about its cloud security posture, have difficulty pinpointing issues in its application logic, and be unable to plan ahead for outages or supply formal outage reports to stakeholders.

Azure monitoring services provide a comprehensive array of features to help improve your cloud operations.

Summary

In this module, we wanted to help Tailwind Traders choose the right serverless computing technology for its business scenarios.

When the company needed to build a solution that pulls code logic from an existing C# Windows service, we helped it choose Azure Functions.

When the company needed to orchestrate a workflow to improve customer retention after a negative shopping experience, we helped it choose Azure Logic Apps.

In both cases, we noted how choosing the other serverless computing service would be possible. However, we tried to help the company consider the decision criteria we outlined and choose the right service for the scenario.

Without serverless computing, Tailwind Traders would be forced to set up and manage its own computing infrastructure for these business scenarios. The team would have needed to closely monitor the services to determine whether it needed to scale the service. And it likely would have wasted money in the process, with either too many or too few computing resources dedicated to the solution.

Additionally, it might have had to design, write, test, and maintain custom code to get similar results.

By helping Tailwind Traders select the right serverless computing solutions, we were able to deploy new functionality to help the company improve customer satisfaction with its e-commerce platform.