The public cloud provides the ability to rent a supercomputer’s worth of processing power on a moment’s notice for an important task and then deallocate the resources just as fast, but not every project necessities so much infrastructure. In fact, many applications only require the ability to run a few lines of code every now and then when an important piece of data is collected from a user, or a minor issue emerges that needs correcting quickly. That’s the use case that Microsoft Corp. hopes to address with the new developer service was unveiled at its Build event today.

Azure Functions makes it possible to have an automated action trigger in response to a particular  event without requiring a customer to create the complex logical scaffolding needed to support such functionality from scratch. All it takes to use the service is a snippet of code written in one of the four languages supported on launch and a list of execution conditions. It’s more or less the same value proposition that Amazon Inc. offers with its Lambda service.

The tool has emerged as the fastest-growing offerings on the company’s public cloud since its launch in early 2015, which is saying a lot considering that AWS generated more than $2.4 billion in revenue last quarter. But Microsoft will likely face a much harder time marketing its alternative given its rival’s lead and the fact that other vendors have recently started joining the fray as well. The most notable of the bunch is Google Inc., which launched its own Lambda rival just a few short weeks ago.

The sudden surge in competition over sporadically-running workloads should significantly increase the pressure on the three cloud giants to set their services apart. As a result, users can expect a steady influx of new functionality and price cuts over the coming months, especially as more large organizations with advanced requirements start taking interest in the technology.

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