Microsoft had reserved Day 2 of its BUILD 2016 developer conference for Azure related news, and the company has just announced the preview of Azure Functions, an on-demand compute service with no upfront fee.
Azure Functions is a service similar to Amazon Lambda and the recently launched Google Cloud Functions, which provide customers with the ability to process and react to events from Azure or any on-premise application.
As the service is an on-demand one, customers only need to pay for the resources utilized to run the code once an event is triggered. Also, there are no upfront or termination fees. The pricing system has been closely matched with Amazon Lambda and the customers will be billed for the closest to 100 milliseconds.
The features provided by Microsoft are also similar to what its competitors are offering, such as automatic scaling, continuous integration, HTTP API for controlling events and support for browser-based as well as native development tools.
Source: Microsoft