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Creating modern cloud apps for the ever-evolving and fast-paced world is both exciting and challenging. Developers today can take advantage of many tools and technologies; and Microsoft’s masterclass titled ‘Powering the apps for tomorrow’ deep-dived into the advantages and role of Azure serverless, cloud-native, and AI platforms in strengthening businesses and platforms to cater to customers’ needs.

“Factors such as migrating to the public cloud, shortening the time to market, reassessing investment, enabling remote development, democratising technology development, harnessing growing data, and prioritising reliability and security will be key application innovation trends in 2022 and beyond,” said Maheshkumar R, Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft India, at YourStory’s Future of Work Summit 2022.

Build, deploy, and operate serverless apps

Explaining the working and benefits of Azure serverless, Mahesh listed event grid, logic apps, and functions as three key offerings that can help developers create a serverless platform. Developers can choose from a range of serverless execution environments, fully managed services, and a comprehensive set of developer tools and services to build their applications.

Azure serverless solutions deliver more value to the core of any business by minimising the time and resources one spends on infrastructure-related requirements. Additionally, Azure serverless helps in boosting developer productivity, optimising resources, and accelerating the pace of innovation because of its fully managed, end-to-end solutions. Azure functions support seven coding languages such as C#, JavaScript, F#, Java, Python, TypeScript, and PowerShell.

To give an example of the robustness of the Azure serverless platform, Mahesh presented a demo on creating a simple workflow.

Microsoft’s Azure serverless lets a user enjoy freedom from infrastructure management, irrespective of the application and technologies they are using.

Innovate with cloud-native

“Azure is pioneer in delivering better developer experience in the Kubernetes ecosystem,” said Mahesh while explaining Kubernetes, the open-source orchestration software for deploying, managing, and scaling containers.

He also touched upon deploying and managing containerised applications more easily with a fully managed Kubernetes service – Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

“AKS offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. Businesses can unite their development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver, and scale applications with confidence,” he added.

Under Kubernetes, Mahesh also mentioned Open Service Mesh (OSM), an add-on, built on top of Kubernetes. It enables easy traffic shifting, access control configuration, and microservices communication monitoring.

Mahesh briefly spoke about Azure container apps, a fully managed serverless container service for building and deploying modern apps at scale. Its features include supporting variety of application types, including HTTP APIs, microservices, event processing, and background tasks, providing flexibility to write code using your language, framework, or SDK of choice, providing robust autoscaling capabilities based on HTTP traffic or event triggers, and providing simple configurations to perform modern application lifecycle tasks.

Leveraging AI using Azure cognitive services

Cognitive services enable developers and data scientists of all skill levels to easily add AI capabilities to their apps. “Azure cognitive services help in identifying and analysing content within images, videos and digital links, integrate speech processing into apps and services, extract meaning from unstructured text, and make smarter decisions faster,” added Mahesh.

“Some scenarios to know and understand on how azure services can be leveraged are claims management and automation overview and documentation process automation solution overview,” said Mahesh signing off.