Understanding Functions

Azure Functions fills a large role in execution environments while focusing on event-based data processing. Traditionally, those environments have a lot of overhead in terms of hardware or virtual machines (VMs) and boilerplate code. Functions is Microsoft’s execution environment to allow ease of development, deployment, and scaling. While a few types of underlying execution environments are available, it defaults to consumption, which brings a set of defaults that are well suited to a large variety of different data processing scenarios and are billed per event execution. If you need more CPU cores or memory, other environments are available; these will be covered later in this chapter. While all execution environments in Functions are considered serverless in the sense that you don’t have to manage individual instances, other non-consumption environments are not pay-per-use and instead are charged based on the amount of CPU cores and memory allocated...