Cloud communications platform Twilio Inc. today announced the release of Twilio Functions, a serverless environment designed for software developers to build and run communications applications.

Using Functions, developers and businesses need not worry about building out, configuring and scaling web infrastructure for messaging applications. Through Functions, Twilio’s own cloud acts as host for applications written by developers and also provides an environment which can provide coding tools to interact directly with the code runtime.

Twilio announced Functions today at the company’s Signal developer conference and details are available on its website.

“Writing code is a creative endeavor,” Patrick Malatack, vice president of product at Twilio, said in an interview. “The developers and businesses building cloud communications apps should be focusing on the customer experience, not managing servers.”

With Functions environment, developers provide Twilio the code for handling communications events – for example, how to handle incoming phone calls or Short Message Service messages – and the platform automatically handles the provisioning of web services required to run the code securely and at scale.

Functions is built on Twilio Runtime, also announced today, which is a preconfigured environment that includes helper libraries, application programming interface keys, media asset storage, debugging tools and other resources developers need to get up and running quickly.

Code can be written directly into a browser running the Functions web page and the function, as written, will have access to all the libraries required without the need for importing anything. The idea behind Functions and Runtime is to put everything at developers’ fingertips and let them get down to business.

Functions will launch with support for an industry-standard Node.js runtime environment and developers can write functions in everyday JavaScript. Functions can be attached to any Twilio messaging apparatus or conversation from text to voice calls. That means developers can write all the business logic for an interactive voice response system, which is what customers interact with when using telephone banking or similar services, all in one place.

Because the code is hosted directly in Twilio’s cloud, developers need not worry about load testing or scaling dynamics. Functions will handle concerns about infrastructure and scaling automatically as message volume increases and decreases.

Twilio Functions is now available to all customers with an account. Initial pricing is free for the first 10,000 requests per month and then a hundredth of a cent for each request after that.

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