ORLANDO, Florida – Microsoft launched general availability of its Azure Functions Premium product that tackles a handful of ongoing serverless challenges like cold start, network isolation, secrets management, and monitoring. It also unveiled an update to its Durable Functions platform that is targeted at managing remote sensors and IoT devices.

During a panel presentation at this week’s Microsoft Ignite 2019 event touting the premium launch, Jeff Hollan, principal project manager for Azure Functions at Microsoft, explained that the cold start and network isolation updates were two items that users were clamoring for.

Serverless functions gain efficiency by being able to scale down to zero when not needed. This allows a user to more finely control resource usage. However, this also means that serverless-based applications need a split second to start back up. This can be an issue for the growing number of applications that rely on a serverless component.

“If you have used serverless before you might have heard about cold start, which is a big scary word of like hey my function might be a little slower if I haven’t called on it for a while,” Hollan said. “With the premium plan we try to take care of some of those hiccups, but also give you more control.”

Hollan said that with the premium offering, users can set it up so functions never go completely idle. “I want it to always be ready to run, connected to a virtual network on massive instances like four cores for high performance,” he noted as an example of what the update can support.

Serverless applications and websites that are hosted in Azure App Service and Azure Functions can now tap into secrets management within Azure Key Vault without the need for code changes. And for easier lifecycle management, users can tap Key Vault events on the Azure Event Grid platform to trigger automation workflows.

Microsoft also added Azure Functions and Azure App Service integration into its Azure Monitor Logs. This will send log telemetry on function health to a single workspace where a user can then create queries to retrieve, consolidate, and analyze collected data – including third-party services for analysis – or to set alert rules.

And Azure Functions gained support for the PowerShell scripting language that is built on Microsoft’s .NET platform. It’s a broadly used script language in the Microsoft ecosystem that wit support in Azure Functions allows for better management of coding resources.

Microsoft also announced the 2.0 GA release of its Durable Functions product, which is an Azure Functions extension that supports stateful functions in a serverless compute environment. Stateful functions are those that require memory to operate.

The main component of the 2.0 update is the Durable Entities service that allows for programming of “stable functions.” These were described as functions tied to services like IoT where an IT administrator can have a graphical view of all of the IoT devices that are part of their network or service. The service can detect when a device has not checked in that it's functioning, which could indicate a malfunction. It can then provide that information in a graphical interface that can be monitored from a single pane of glass.

“Seeing when something is alive or making sure there’s a trigger to execute when a message is sent is easy enough, but then knowing the absence of a trigger can be very hard,” Hollan said of how the the update can help the monitoring of IoT devices.

The Azure Functions updates also highlights the continuing challenges around the serverless ecosystem. Customers that want to take advantage of the new Azure Functions Premium features will need to be tied into the Azure infrastructure. This is probably not an issue at the current early stage of serverless usage but could become a problem for organizations down the line if they look to operate or migrate their serverless applications in a multi-cloud environment.

There have been some efforts to migrate serverless into that environment, including some from vendors that are based on the Kubernetes-based Knative platform. Microsoft has even jumped on this path through its Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) platform. That platform, which was developed with Red Hat, allows developers to run serverless functions within a Kubernetes environment across other clouds and on-premises locations.

But, with the latest Azure Functions updates it looks like Microsoft is trying to keep its serverless customers from straying too far.

Jeff Hollan (center), principal project manager for Azure Functions at Microsoft, discusses updates to the Microsoft Azure Functions platform at this week's Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida.