Microsoft Azure is a powerful platform for serverless computing, enabling users to run their event-driven workloads. It’s extremely scalable with reach to more than 50 regions across the world. This means users can scale and replicate event-driven workloads around the globe in a matter of minutes! It’s a powerful architecture.
However, with great power comes some complexity. “It’s easier to build one app that does intake processing and one data store,” said Richard Seroter of VMware. “But if you want to scale individual components, if you want to update these components in pieces, then you would want to decompose everything into a set of services. That makes everything complicated very quickly.”
Cloud Foundry brings some balance to Azure. It allows customers to reap the benefits of such a powerful event-driven architecture without compromising on ease of use. If you are building event-driven apps using Azure functions, you need the libraries and frameworks to make it a little simpler. Cloud Foundry provides that.
At the same time, Azure users see the value of running a platform like Cloud Foundry on top of Azure that helps with their dev lifecycle and ownership of infrastructure. Cloud Foundry also benefits from the scale that Azure offers — something users running event-driven architecture demand as they have to scale in and out.
Another advantage of Cloud Foundry lies in the fact that in an event-driven architecture, users are going to do batch processing. They may also do streaming apps, web apps, function apps. Some of this is already supported by Spring Cloud Function and VMware Functions Service.
Cloud Foundry and Spring make things even easier for users who plan to run an event-driven architecture that is the same everywhere. In these cases, a customer is going to do a mix of things: on-prem, off-prem, co-location and multi-cloud. The ideal situation is to stamp out the same event-driven architecture regardless of their infrastructure pool. Cloud Foundry makes this ideal situation realistic.
That is why Cloud Foundry is extremely popular with Azure customers. In fact, Cloud Foundry won Microsoft’s consumption partner of the year in 2017.
Check out this talk by Richard Seroter of VMware & Asir Vedamuthu Selvasingh of Microsoft in which they highlight the event-driven architecture of Azure, and how Cloud Foundry and Spring solve problems for users!
