There are two types of queuing mechanisms supported by Azure. Storage Queues are part of the Azure Storage infrastructure, feature a simple REST-based GET/PUT/PEEK interface, providing reliable, persistent messaging within and between services. Service Bus Queues are part of a broader Azure messaging infrastructure that supports queuing as well as publish/subscribe mechanism, and more advanced integration patterns.

Whether you help architect serverless applications at work or you’re just getting started in the community, chances are you’ve caught wind of a ServerlessDays event. Each one gathers members of a local community to talk about where serverless technology currently stands and where it’s going. The best part is that they are a true community event, built by and for serverless users.

Azure App Service, one of the most used among the Azure offered Services. When the requirement is to host web applications, REST APIs, and mobile back ends, Azure App Service is the go-to Http- based solution. Apps hosted in Azure App Service can be integrated with on-premises or cloud services. It supports both the Windows and Linux-based environments to run and scale the applications.

Team Stackery has been hosting the PDX Serverless Architecture meetup at our Portland office since June of 2018, although the meetup began the year before. It’s always great to see repeat visitors and new faces, and especially to see our community change over the months. In February, we had an entertaining, dynamic, and knowledgeable speaker in Yves Gurcan.

This weekend I had the opportunity to participate in the AWS Hackathon in Portland. Based on the hackathons hosted at re:Invent, this brought together about 100 developers of all skill levels to break up into small teams and produce a demo product in 10 hours. I had a great time, and wanted to share what I learned! There may be organization-specific roadblocks to adopting AWS Lambda right now and therefore, it might not be the right fit for your team at this particular juncture.

In a real-time business scenario, various Azure services are integrated to define a business process. Day by day these business processes grow in complexity and monitoring them turns out to be a real challenge. In order to overcome these challenges, Serverless360 provides end-to-end tracking via Business Activity Monitoring.

Azure Functions team is back again for their monthly live webcast with a lot of interesting updates and community highlights. This webcast was quite special since their announcement on Social Media regarding the new Azure Functions management experience in the portal certainly created a buzz. In this session, Jeff Hollan, Byron Cardiff and Matthew Henderson joined to give us a picture of the latest happenings in the Azure Functions space.

Too often serverless is equated with just AWS Lambda. Yes, it’s true: Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped to pioneer what is commonly referred to as serverless today with AWS Lambda, which was first announced back in 2015. But in 2020, it’s important for enterprises to understand that the serverless landscape is much bigger with more opportunities. Serverless is sometimes (narrowly) defined as just being about functions-as-a-service, but that’s a very limited viewpoint.

Serverless applications, due to their distributed nature, are often stuck having to reinvent the wheel. While small utility scripts and functions are often easily instrumented and monitored, anything of a transactional nature will need to implement special code to provide developers with common tools like stack traces, atomicity, and other patterns that rely on a singular flow of control.

The seamless scaling and headache-free reliability of a serverless application architecture has become compelling to a broad community of cloud specialists. But for those who have yet to become converts, a specific issue related to service startup latency—Cold Starts—has been one of the cited key objections. Fortunately, the serverless marketplace is maturing.