Azure SQL Database is a managed service that provides low-maintenance SQL Server instances in the cloud. You don’t have to run and update VMs, or even take backups and setup failover clusters. Microsoft will do administration for you, you just pay an hourly fee.

Azure Functions are designed for stateless, fast-to-execute, simple actions. Typically, they are triggered by an HTTP call or a queue message, then they read something from the storage or database and return the result to the caller or send it to another queue. All within several seconds at most.

I’m writing this post in the train to London Stensted, on my way back from F# Exchange 2018 conference.

F# Exchange is a yearly conference taking place in London, and 2018 edition was the first one for me personally. I also had an honour to speak there about creating Azure Functions with F#.

Auto-provisioning and auto-scalability are the killer features of Function-as-a-Service cloud offerings, and Azure Functions in particular.

One drawback of such dynamic provisioning is a phenomenon called “Cold Start”. Basically, applications that haven’t been used for a while take longer to startup and to handle the first request.