Microsoft Touts Serverless Computing With Azure Event Grid

Microsoft has launched Azure Event Grid, – a fully-managed intelligent event routing service in the cloud

It is designed to help those organisations whose developers are constructing applications that respond to events, such as updating a database, a user clicking on a mobile app, uploading a picture, or data coming in from an IoT device.

Azure Event Grid makes these everyday events or functions a ‘first class Azure Object’, which in turn works and integrates with serverless platforms such as Azure Functions (a serverless compute engine), and Azure Logic Apps (serverless workflow orchestration engine).

Azure Event Grid

Essentially, Azure Event Grid allows a developer to focus on their application without the need to worry about any infrastructure, provisioning, or scaling, explained Corey Sanders, director of compute at Azure in a blog post.

“Today, I am excited to announce that we are making event-based and serverless applications even easier to build on Azure,” he said. “Azure Event Grid is a fully-managed event routing service and the first of its kind. Azure Event Grid greatly simplifies the development of event-based applications and simplifies the creation of serverless workflows. Using a single service, Azure Event Grid manages all routing of events from any source, to any destination, for any application.

“With Azure Event Grid, you can subscribe to any event that is happening across your Azure resources and react using serverless platforms like Functions or Logic Apps. In addition to having built-in publishing support for events with services like Blob Storage and Resource Groups, Event Grid provides flexibility and allows you to create your own custom events to publish directly to the service.”

So Azure Event Grid classifies events as first-class objects with intelligent filtering, such as event type, prefix or suffix. This allows the application application to only receive the events the developer is concerned about.

The developer also doesn’t need to fret about scale, as Azure Event Grid is designed to be highly available and to handle massive scale dynamically.

And it allows for new serverless possibilities, and also opens up the possibility of ops automation thanks to an unified event management interface.

Azure Expansion

Microsoft is expanding the number of event sources and destinations it offers with Azure Event Grid, including Azure Active Directory, API Management, IoT Hub, Service Bus, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Data Factory, and Storage Queues.

Azure Event Grid is available on a pay-per-event pricing basis, so organisations only pay for what they use. The first 100,000 operations per month are free. Beyond 100,000 per month, pricing is $0.30 per million operations (per-operation) during the preview.

Microsoft is working hard to expand its Azure platform of late.

This week for example it purchased cloud computing orchestration specialist Cycle Computing in a bid to make it easier for customers to take advantage of the Big Computing features on its Azure platform.

It has also announced two new data centre regions for Australia, bringing the total number to 42 worldwide.

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