Microsoft Brings Cross-Platform and Java Support to Azure Serverless Compute
Nearly a year after rolling out its Azure Functions serverless compute option for running event-driven, modern PaaS apps and services, Microsoft has given it a cross-platform boost. The company announced it had ported the Azure Functions service to the new .NET Core 2.0 framework during the Ignite conference in Orlando, Fla., late last month. On the heels of that release, Microsoft made available a public preview of its Java runtime for Azure Functions during last week's JavaOne conference in San Francisco.
Azure Functions provides elastic compute triggered by events within any service in Azure or third-party service, in addition to on-premises infrastructure, according to Microsoft. By porting it to .NET Core 2.0, both the Azure Functions Core Tools and runtime are now cross-platform, Microsoft announced at Ignite, though acknowledged in the Sept. 25 post that there are some known issues and functional gaps.
Java support in Azure Functions has been a top request, according to the announcement posted last week by Nir Mashkowski, partner director for the Azure App Service. "The new Java runtime will share all the differentiated features provided by Azure Functions, such as the wide range of triggering options and data bindings, serverless execution model with auto-scale, as well as pay-per-execution pricing," Mashkowski noted.
The preview includes a new Maven plug-in, a tool for building and deploying Azure Functions from that environment, he noted. "The new Azure Functions Core Tools will support you to run and debug your Java Functions code locally on any platform," he said.
Until now, Azure Functions supported C#, F#, JavaScript (Node.js), PowerShell, PHP, Python, CMD, BAT and Bash. In addition, the new Azure Functions is open source and available on GitHub. Azure Functions integrates with SaaS applications and a list of interfaces and supports authentication via standard OAuth providers including Azure Active Directory, a Microsoft account, Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Microsoft also posted some five-minute tutorials that demonstrate how to build and deploy Java app services and serverless functions. Microsoft also held two sessions at JavaOne that describe how to build and deploy serverless Java apps in Azure that are now available for replay.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/13/2017 at 12:31 PM