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Comment by crandycodes | Hacker News Reader

I'm Chris from the Azure Functions team. Feel free to AMA.

Are there any significant differences between this and AWS Lambda? I know this sounds accusative and I swear I don't mean it that way: Lambda is awesome and if this is more-or-less the same thing, this will be too. I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly what the service is :)

You can see our full list of features here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/fun...

One feature I'm particularly proud of is our code-less integration that lets you output to various services without writing against their SDK, saving lots of boilerplate code.

I'm also on the Azure Functions team.

I have only played around with Lambda (so I'm not an expert), but I find Azure Functions to be much more streamlined. Lambda had a lot of really confusing options for URL rewrite, and I got really hung up with the fact that even site configuration is not saved until you redeploy. I can understand that behavior for reliability reasons, but they didn't show anything in the UI that showed that either the site or the config was dirty.

Obviously Lambda is more mature at the moment, but there are interesting aspects of Functions compared to them. For instance, is it possible to host a Lambda function on your own hosting plan (or the AWS equivalent?). I couldn't figure this out though the console, but I'm not an AWS expert.

We also have support for hosting Functions on an App Service Environment (ASE), which is your own dedicated set of VMs.

But, I'd like to from you what you like about Lambda and what you think of Functions once you have used it! What are your top 3 favorite features of Lambda?

Why is Microsoft being so awesome today?

Today specifically? It's Microsoft build conference. It's when they release all their stuff.

True, but I can't remember whatever they released last year ;)

UK-AL is right, today is the day to be awesome. My personal answer is that the people working at Microsoft are awesome. We built this product in less than 90 days based on existing platforms; we were given the freedom and resources to do that. Awesome things are going to happen when we have that kind of environment.

I got asked a lot of questions about how we're built today and so I'm adding this comment for historical purposes.

We're built around WebJobs SDK and App Service, so much of the core work was done already and I had a plan in the works for a few months to bring Node support (I'm a Node.js nerd) to WebJobs. WebJobs has been and is increasingly popular, so it was a no brainer for our team to go and expand and promote it. It was still a lot of work to deliver a WebJobsSDK-as-a-service, but we knew we had a solid core and a great PaaS platform before we even got started.

My biggest annoyance with Lambda is that it's stuck on node 0.10.x. How are language versions handled on Azure Functions?

Right now we're using node 4.1.1, we're still looking into handling language versions.

This is super high on my priorities since I still at least attempt to impersonate a Node dev. I can at least sleep at night knowing I didn't launch a product on 0.10.x. :)

As a heads up, node will pick up destructuring the next time they bump v8. That's the last feature keeping me on Babel so I expect adoption to be fairly quick.

serverside you can pass --harmony_destructuring to get that on v5.

1. Are you planning to support other languages?

2. Are you going to support Amazon API Gateway style Swagger API routing?

3. How monitoring and tracing is done?

Great questions.

1. We have experimental support for a few other languages (F#, Python, PHP, Batch, etc.). We'll be improving those as we get more customer input on how it should work and we have time to do it. You can track our progress and post issues here: https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk-script

2. We have a service known as Azure API Management which can do that and we're working to integrate first class support for Functions into it. Today, you can manually construct a Swagger with Functions for API Management, but we want to make it even easier in the near future.

3. Monitoring can be done via the Monitoring tab in the portal. We have logs and a streaming realtime view. They are VERY early and you'll see big progress for those views in the next two months.

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