AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam
Venture into the world of Azure Infrastructure, where design meets functionality. Harness your skills and gain mastery over complex cloud structures to ace the AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam!
Practice Test
Expert
Practice Test
Expert
Recommend a serverless-based solution
Recommend a Serverless-Based Solution
Evaluate Azure Serverless Plans and Event Integration
Azure Functions offers three main hosting plans: Consumption, Premium, and Dedicated.
- Consumption plan scales automatically to zero when idle and charges based on execution counts, but may have cold-start delays.
- Premium plan provides pre-warmed instances to eliminate cold starts and supports VNET integration, with pricing based on instance count and runtime.
- Dedicated (App Service) plan runs on fixed resources you manage, offering predictable performance but requiring manual scaling.
When you create a function app, you must link it to a general-purpose Azure Storage account that supports Blob, Queue, and Table storage.
- To reduce latency, place your storage account in the same region as your function app.
- For high-volume scenarios like Durable Functions or Event Hubs triggers, use a separate storage account per function app. You can also mount file shares on Linux apps to handle large data sets.
How you organize and deploy functions affects performance and scalability.
- In Consumption and Premium plans, all functions in a function app scale together.
- Group functions by load profile, configuration, and privilege scope to avoid resource contention.
- Use run from package, deployment slots, and warm-up triggers on Premium plans to minimize downtime and cold starts.
Serverless solutions rely on event-driven compute patterns using triggers from Event Grid, Service Bus, and HTTP endpoints.
- Event Grid triggers deliver low-latency, push-based events directly to functions.
- Service Bus triggers handle reliable messaging with at-least-once delivery semantics.
- HTTP triggers expose REST endpoints for external callers. For VNET-protected sources, run on Premium or Flex Consumption plans and enable dynamic scale monitoring to ensure functions react to incoming events.
To build robust, cost-effective workflows, integrate Azure Functions with Logic Apps.
- Use Functions for custom compute logic and Logic Apps for visual orchestration and rich connector support.
- Compare Standard vs Consumption Logic Apps by pricing model, throughput, and network integration. This hybrid approach achieves optimal performance, cost efficiency, and reliability for event-driven solutions.
Conclusion
In summary, when recommending a serverless-based solution using Azure, it's essential to understand the different hosting plans available for Azure Functions: Consumption, Premium, and Dedicated. The choice of plan impacts scaling behaviors, cold-start implications, and overall performance. Additionally, integrating event-driven workflows using triggers from Event Grid, Service Bus, and HTTP endpoints is crucial for achieving defined performance and availability objectives. Linking function apps to appropriate storage accounts and organizing functions by load profile ensures optimal scalability. Finally, combining Azure Functions with Logic Apps provides a powerful hybrid approach for custom compute logic and orchestration needs.