Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Functions 2.0. The new release aims to handle demanding workloads, which should make managing the scale of serverless applications easier than ever before.
With an improved user experience, and new developer capabilities, the release is evidence of Microsoft looking to take full advantage of interest in serverless computing.
New features in Azure Functions 2.0
Azure Functions can now run on more platforms
Azure Functions are now supported on more environments, including local Mac or Linux machines. An integration with its VS Code will help developers have a best-in-class serverless development experience on any platform.
Code optimizations
Functions 2.0 has added general host improvements, support for more modern language runtimes, and the ability to run code from a package file. .NET developers can now author functions using .NET Core 2.1. This provides a significant performance gain and helps to develop and run .NET functions in more places. Assembly resolution functions have been improved to reduce the number of conflicts. Functions 2.0 now supports both Node 8 and Node 10, with improved performance in general.
A powerful new programming model
Bindings and integrations of Functions 1.0 have been improvised in functions 2.0. All bindings are brought in as extensions. The change to decoupled extension packages allows bindings (and their dependencies) to be versioned without depending on the core runtime. The recent launch of Azure SignalR Service, a fully managed service, enables focus on building real-time web experiences without worrying about setting up, hosting, scaling, or load balancing the SignalR server. Find an extension for this service, in this GitHub repo. Check out the SignalR Service binding reference to start building real-time serverless applications.
Easier development
To improve productivity, Microsoft has introduced a powerful native tooling inside of Visual Studio, VS Code, VS for Mac, and a CLI that can be run alongside any code editing experience. In Functions 2.0, more visibility is given to distributed tracing. Dependencies are automatically tracked, and cross-resource connections are automatically correlated across a variety of services
To know more about the updates in Azure Functions 2.0 head to Microsoft’s official Blog
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