DevOps, Serverless, and Azure Durable Functions — Part 1 Azure wins!
If your diving into Serverless you need to pick a cloud provider you align with. And the best for the future is Azure. The capabilities and future of Azure look bright and exciting. But why not AWS and GCP they are more developer friendly? Good question and I got an answer… because they don’t. Azure and serverless are going to fit together well and here’s why.
Serverless and what it means
Since code and infrastructure are tightly coupled in serverless, vendor lock-in is inevitable. Third-party tools love to tell you they are agnostic, but your code is still tied to its underlying OS. In the case of serverless, it’s your cloud provider.
For any successful project, your cloud provider needs to align their long-term strategy with your business strategy. Microsoft aligns with your business more than you think.
- AWS — Main focus: Grow Amazon.com
- GCP — Main Focus: create marketing and ads with free technology
- Azure — Main Focus: Give tools and API’s to developers to grow their business
The business of Microsoft is Developers
Microsoft was the original software developer bff. They pioneered the concept of developer communities and tooling to bolster their platform. If you aren’t familiar with the history of Microsoft, read this article.
Microsoft’s strength is API’s
Joel Spolsky, in his article “How Microsoft Lost the API War, ” stats Microsoft became successful from opening up its windows API’s. What led to their downfall is the internet boom and the irrelevance of those API’s.
Microsoft’s crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft’s monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft’s income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers.
As the internet grew, OS API’s took the form of REST API’s and consumable services. Open source helped others build faster. Companies like Twilio branded themselves as communication platforms for developers. In order for Microsoft to get back into the game, they must reinvent what their API is… along comes Azure.
What’s Great About Azure
Since features change so often, I’m not going into a feature list comparison. What is something to take note is that Azure/Microsoft have been doing software for a long time, and it shows! If the following things matter to you, you should definitely move to Azure.
- Compliance: More compliance than anyone
- Data: SQL Server is consistently a leader. gartner quadrant
- Data: Cosmosdb first globally distributed database service with guaranteed latency
- Data: Gartner recognizes PowerBI leader in analytics and BI
- AI is everywhere with Azure
- Visual Studio still best IDE according to G2crowd
- Azure Durable Functions: First stateful serverless function
Buy in
Embrace the technology that is coming. Azure is going to be a powerhouse for any developer in this century. For all the reason I already stated, partnering more with Azure will benefit greatly in the long run.
