Serverless computing is ideal for high-volume, transactional workloads that don’t require persistent infrastructure.

Developers are accelerating their use of serverless architectures like Azure Functions to speed up deployments (update a function definition and kick it off within seconds), scale instantly (with countless concurrent processes), and optimize costs (with billing based on processor time and memory usage).

While serverless functions thrive independently in batch processing workloads, they’re often paired with or replaced by messages buses like Azure Service Bus to take advantage of the “Pub-Sub” communication model and more mature tooling.

With the introduction of Azure Event Grid, Azure Functions gain better integration, instrumentation, and tooling to connect services and bypass the need for separate message buses.

Overview of Azure Event Grid

Azure Event Grid is a managed event routing service with full support for publishing and subscribing to topics.

It is similar in scope to AWS Lambda, except it has explicit separation of the communications layer (Event Grid) and processing layer (Azure Functions). By decoupling the two pieces, Event Grid can trigger Azure Functions (most common), but also LogicApps, or even direct Azure VMs to process data.

Core Azure services like BLOB storage and Event Hubs have native tooling to act as topic “publishers”. Similarly, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, or Azure Automation scripts can be configured as “subscribers”. Custom integrations can also be added as web hooks, supporting publishing or subscribing to changes.

Because Azure Event Grid responds to events on Azure services, it is language-agnostic. Pricing is $0.60 per million operations, with 100,000 free operations per month.

Azure Event Grid is an ideal foundation for building distributed microservices-based applications.