Azure Functions

Azure Functions is Microsoft's serverless compute platform: you write a function, attach it to a trigger — a new file in storage, a message on a queue, an HTTP request, a timer — and Azure runs it when that trigger fires, without you provisioning or managing a server in between. It supports C#, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, Python, and, more recently, Rust and Go, and functions can be developed and tested locally before being deployed to the cloud.

Scaling is handled automatically, from zero instances when nothing's happening up to whatever concurrency a burst of triggers requires, and several hosting plans exist depending on how much control you need over the underlying compute — a pure consumption model that scales to zero, a Premium plan for workloads that can't tolerate cold starts, or hosting inside App Service or Container Apps. For workflows that need to persist state across multiple steps — waiting on external input, retrying failed steps, running steps in sequence — Durable Functions adds orchestration with built-in checkpointing, so a multi-step process can survive a restart partway through.

Because it only runs (and only bills) in response to events, Functions tends to be the right fit for processing that's inherently event-driven rather than continuous: reacting to files as they arrive, handling real-time data streams, integrating services without hard-wiring them together, and — increasingly — running the backend logic behind chatbots and retrieval-augmented AI applications.

How EWO 360° uses Azure Functions

We use Functions for exactly the kind of work it's designed for: processing that only needs to happen when something specific occurs, not on a server that's running around the clock waiting for it. That covers asset conversion — a file gets uploaded and a function transforms it — and general event handling where one system's action needs to trigger a response in another, without us standing up and maintaining a dedicated service just to sit idle between events.