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Azure Functions 2022 recap and 2023 sneak peek

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Tech Community - Latest Blogs - .

Firstly wish you all a very happy new year. I sincerely hope that this year brings you much success. As I was doing a perspective of last year of the value that we added for Azure Functions customers - although we shipped 100’s of small improvements - I wanted to share with all of you a recap of all the major releases and provide a sneak peek on what we are working on in this year.

 

Language Versions Support: This year we continued on making sure that our customers have access to the latest language versions for various languages as soon as we can. We believe we have the most comprehensive latest support across all the major languages among all the major cloud serverless vendors. These include support for .NET 7, Python 3.10, NodeJS 18, Java 17, PowerShell 7.2 across all the SKU’s that Azure Functions support.

Durable Functions: Durable Functions continues to be a real differentiator for Azure Functions and we continue to invest heavily supporting many large customers. Big releases were support for Java in Durable Function with which we now have support for Durable in all the major languages that Functions support. Others include support for out of proc .NET (including .NET 7), performance improvements for NodeJS and Identity based connections when using Azure Storage.

Programming Model improvements: We want to make sure that Azure Functions development feels first class for every developer. regardless of the language they are using. As part of this we have set out to create new programming models for various languages. The first one out of the gate is Python : Public preview: V2 programming model for Azure Functions using Python | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure

Integration with different event sources: One of the core value propositions of Azure Functions is the integration with various Azure Services and event based systems. In the last year we continue to add more event sources including SQL Server, Kafka, Event Grid for Blob, latest version of Cosmos DB, Azure Table among other enhancements.

Performance including Scaling: We continued to invest in improving Cold Start for our customers and we made significant improvements for a majority of our scenarios. One of the reasons of choosing Serverless is the ability to scale based on events. We continue to invest heavily in this space and we will have much to share in the upcoming year but we released capabilities to set up concurrency dynamically. Generally available: Dynamic concurrency in Azure Functions | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure and increased instance limits for those who wanted to use Linux Elastic Premium - Generally available: Azure Functions Linux Elastic Premium plan increased maximum scale-out limits | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure

Fundamentals including - Support, Reliability, Release, Region support, Logic Apps: Although new features and capabilities are always exciting a big part of what we also spent time on is to support existing customers. We have invested a lot in the last year so that we can react faster and provide better support to our hundreds and thousands of customers. We have also increased our reliability across many features like deployment and outages due to capacity availability. We have also invested significantly in releasing faster with safety so that last year we had many more releases than the year before and have increased our pace of delivery considerably. We have released Azure Functions support in many more regions all around the world including France, Korea, Qatar, Sweden among others.

Logic Apps Standard which uses Functions underneath was also updated to use the latest version of Functions. - Generally available: Logic Apps Standard Support for Functions Runtime V4 | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure

Going forward - as we talk to customers every day - especially in the current environment - they are all looking for ways to use their cloud spend efficiently and Serverless/Azure Functions can be a great answer to that. We are going to double down in the upcoming year on making it easier for customers to use Functions and give customers more options to host Functions. 

In particular,

We have seen a record year in terms of usage and revenue and we thank you our customers for this and hopefully you will continue to use Functions and provide feedback to continue to improve our service so that it remains useful to you.

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