Azure Functions is a service that enables serverless architectures in Azure. You can write functions without worrying about the supporting infrastructure in many different languages, including C#, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, and Python. You can use libraries from NuGet and the Node Package Manager (npm). You can also authenticate users with the OAuth standard from providers such as Active Directory, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft Account.
When you write a function, you choose a template to use depending on how you want to trigger your code. For example, if you want to execute the function in response to an HTTP request, use the HTTPTrigger template. You can use other templates to execute when there are new messages in a queue, a Blob storage container, or on a predefined schedule.
When you use Azure Functions in a Consumption Plan, you’re charged only for the time that your code runs.
Azure API Management
Azure API Management is a fully managed cloud service that you can use to publish, secure, transform, maintain, and monitor APIs. It helps organizations publish APIs to external, partner, and internal developers to unlock the potential of their data and services. API Management handles all the tasks involved in mediating API calls including request authentication and authorization, rate limit and quota enforcement, request and response transformation, logging and tracing, and API version management. API Management enables you to create and manage modern API gateways for existing backend services no matter where they’re hosted.
Because you can publish Azure Functions through API Management, you can use them to implement a microservices architecture; each function implements a microservice. By adding several functions to a single API Management product, you can build those microservices into an integrated distributed application. Once the application is built, you can use API Management policies to implement caching or ensure security requirements.
API Management Consumption Tier
When you choose a usage plan for API Management, you can choose the consumption tier. The consumption tier is especially suited to microservice-based architectures and event-driven systems. For example, it would be a great choice for our online store web API.
The consumption tier uses the same underlying service components as the previous tiers, but employs an entirely different architecture based on shared, dynamically allocated resources. The consumption tier aligns perfectly with serverless computing models. There’s no infrastructure to manage and no idle capacity. It provides high-availability, automatic scaling, and usage-based pricing. All of which make the consumption tier an especially good choice for solutions that involve exposing serverless resources as APIs.
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