Azure Functions levels up and gets Linux ready

Microsoft has pushed Azure Functions into the Mac and Linux worlds with the release of v 2, which comes with an upgraded host runtime that is supposed to run anywhere.

A preview consumption plan for functions built on Linux is available as a preview at the moment. Developers interested in trying it should email the Azure team. According to their Wiki, the first 60 days of serverless hosting are free. Future plans include the expansion of the Serverless Linux offering and support for Python 3.6. A private preview of the latter can already be found in the Azure repository.

Developers that knew the old runtime will quickly find that all bindings are now extensions, which can be installed with the Functions tooling. As a consequence, bindings and their dependencies can be versioned independently from the runtime. Principal PM Manager Eduardo Laureano suggests that this change in architecture will lead to quicker integration with new Azure Services. One of those is a binding for the now generally available Azure SignalR Service for letting server-side code push content to connected clients in real-time.

The managed SignalR service had been in public preview since May and is now available in regions US East, US East 2, US Central, US West, US West 2, Canada East, West Europe, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia East and Japan East. It is supposed to offer 99.9 per cent availability and is limited to 100K connections per instance in the standard tier. On top of that there’s now support for REST APIs that let admins add users to a group and improve broadcast scenarios.

With Azure Functions 2.0 also comes better integration with Azure Application Insights. It automatically tracks dependencies and correlates cross-resource connections across services. Those are then visualised in a map for better understanding of component interaction. To make deployment easier, Newbies will now be walked through their first deployment. Functions 2.0 also offers a Deployment Center for setting up a preferred code source, which can be found under the section “Platform features” of a Function App.

Laureano recommends upgrading serverless applications built with Azure Functions 1.0 to version 2.0. Some pointers for migrating are available in the documentation. Azure Functions is also available for Kubernetes and IoT Edge.