This blog explains about Azure Functions, their advantages and creation of functions using visual studio.

Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that runs event-triggered code without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure.

Below are some of the advantages of Azure functions:

• Serverless Applications - No need to manage infrastructure and operate to scale in cloud.
• Pay-per-use - Pay only for time running your code.This is the cheap and should be able to perform large number of transactions at low price.
• Choose your language - Write functions in C#, javascript,powershell,python.

Creating Functions using Visual Studio:

Note: Please make sure to create a storage account in Azure. You will need this to test your functions in Azure.

Search for Azure functions project in visual studio and name the project.

Once the project name is given, visual studio displays different type of functions available.Choose the functions you want to use. You may need to provide additional information depending on the function type.

In this post we will be creating Queue trigger(triggers upon a message at queue in storage account),timer trigger(trigger on a specified schedule) and blob trigger((triggers upon a blob insertion in a container in storage account)).

Additional functions can be added using 'New Azure Function' option.

You can test the project using running the application in visual studio which opens a microsoft storage emulator.

A timer functions is created here which runs every 5 minutes, so you should be able to a message that displays every 5 minutes.

This is how you can create Azure functions and test using visual studio.