Azure Updates: Functions scale on demand; Cost Management; MFA

Microsoft VP Scott Hunter explored how GitHub scales on demand with Azure Functions. GitHub is one of the largest developer platforms in the world, currently owned by Microsoft. Until recently, it ran into limits with its internal systems due to the 700 terabytes of data it collects daily for detecting malicious behavior which was throttling its system. To support scalability objectives and process the event stream at scale, the GitHub team built a function app which runs in Azure Functions Flex Consumption. The publicly available plan for Flex Consumption supports large scale-out features for serverless models, long function execution times, private networking, instance size selection, and other features like concurrency control. 

“This solution has built-in flexibility. The team can vary the number of messages per batch for different use cases and can trust that the target-based scaling capabilities will scale out to the ideal number of instances. In this scaling model, Azure Functions determines the number of unprocessed messages on the event hub and then immediately scales to an appropriate instance count based on the batch size and partition count. At the upper bound, the function app scales up to one instance per event hub partition, which can work out to be 1,000 instances for very large event hub deployments,” he wrote.

Principal product manager Sameer Doultani profiled recent developments in Cost Management in July. To boost exports, Microsoft added Parquet format support, Fabric ingestion, and file compression, along with documentation updates. The addition of FOCUS 1.0 (FinOps Cost Usage and Specification) datasets in Exports together with parquet format means that customers can achieve up to 70 percent reductions in file sizes. Additionally, Microsoft released new pricing pages for AI Health, Phi-3, updated calculators, and new offers and SKUs.