Building Serverless Mobile Apps with Azure functions and Xamarin

The cloud technology envelops the whole gamut of IaaS to PaaS in terms of offerings. While the technology world advances around more flexible, scalable, and modern cloud-based solutions, design & architecture of such applications require a revamp. Serverless Computing comes to the rescue for building modern mobile application with the help of Azure functions and Xamarin. 

What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing is the construct of servers, infrastructure, and operating systems. When you build serverless applications, you need not prerequisite and manage any servers, so you can just forget about infrastructure concerns. Serverless computing is driven by the responses to events and triggers that occur in near real time-in the cloud. As an entirely managed service, server management, and capacity planning are unseen to the developer and billing is based on the resources consumed or on the actual time, your code is running.

How Azure functions help?

Azure Functions allow developers to create a serverless, event-driven experience for their data and applications. Azure Functions is a quick solution to develop small pieces of code in the cloud. You can simply write the code you need for the problem, without worrying about a whole application or the infrastructure to run it. Azure Functions make app development even more productive, as you can use your choice of development language such as, C#, F#, Node.js, Java, or PHP. Azure Functions are easy to maintain, and are accessible through HTTP, they are a great way to implement an API for a mobile application. Microsoft offers a cross-platform tool for iOS, Android and Windows with Xamarin. As such, Xamarin and Azure Functions work great together. 

Azure Functions is the best solution for processing data, integrating systems, working with the internet-of-things (IoT), and building simple APIs and micro-services. Think about Azure Functions for tasks like image or order processing, file maintenance or for any task that you want to run on a schedule.

Below are some key features of Azure Functions:

Choice of programming language - You can write functions using programming language of your choice of C#, F#, or JavaScript. 

Pay-per-use pricing model - Pay only for the time spent running your code.

Bring your own dependencies - Functions supports NuGet and NPM, so you can use your favorite libraries.

Integrated security - Protect HTTP-triggered functions with OAuth providers such as Azure Active Directory, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft Account.

Simplified integration - Easily leverage Azure services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

Flexible development - Code your functions right in the portal or set up continuous integration and deploy your code through GitHub, Visual Studio Team Services, and other supported development tools.

Open-source - The Functions runtime is open-source and available on GitHub.

Azure allows developers to build engaging and high-performing applications quite faster. It enables integrating and scaling your application and therefore adding and testing new application features becomes easier. Developers can power their applications using authentication, push notifications, data synchronizing, and many other services in just a few lines of code.

With Azure’s exclusive Hybrid Cloud Solution, you can write applications and can deploy anywhere. You can easily access any data source in public clouds, private clouds, and Azure’s unique Hybrid Cloud Solution.

About Raybiztech

Raybiztech is a leading Global Information Technology (IT) Services and Solutions, a CMMI Level 3, ISO 27001:2013 Certified Company. We are a Member of NASSCOM, HYSEA, NJTC, and AIIA. Raybiztech is a Microsoft solution partner, has technical experience in ERP, CRM, EAI, Cloud and mobile, offering Xamarin Technology Solutions for Mobile applications for enterprises. Ray Business Technologies has been at the forefront on Xamarin Mobile Apps Development. It has excellent capabilities in Architecture Consulting, Development, Migration, Integration, Reporting, Analytics, Administration, Integrated Marketing, E-commerce, UI Personalization, Load Testing, Support, & maintenance, Application Dashboards, Training, Security Audit, and Performance Optimization for Xamarin. 

Raybiztech has also set up a Xamarin Center of Excellence (CoE) that offers leadership, best practices, research, support, and training on Xamarin.