Extending its reach in the cloud, Microsoft Corp. today announced its Azure Event Grid service is now generally available.

The service is a key part of the company’s strategy for serverless computing, which is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider automatically manages the allocation of machine resources.

The main promise of serverless computing is that developers don’t need to worry about the underlying hardware on which the applications they build runs, making their lives much easier. With serverless computing, cloud providers such as Microsoft manage the hardware instead, allowing developers to write commands around events that take place – for example if a user uploads a photo – that issue functions or instructions to follow them.

Serverless computing has other advantages too, such as enabling users to pay cloud providers by the second rather than by the hour, saving money. It also means developers can write functions to deal with spikes in demand, instead of reacting to the peaks after they occur.

Microsoft’s Azure Event Grid product provides a simple way to manage these functions, Corey Sanders, head of product for Azure Compute, said in a blog post. The product is compatible with Azure Functions and also other functions services such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s rival Lambda service.

Azure Event Grid is also useful to developers employing older techniques, Sanders said. Developers can use the service to enjoy the benefits of event-driven application setups without fully embracing functions. They simply set up their apps to subscribe to various events it might be useful to track.

Microsoft said the most common use cases for Azure Event Grid during its beta were for automating information technology infrastructure around events, and for “internet of things” applications. The company believes that serverless computing is actually complementary to edge computing, which is an essential component for many IoT apps because it brings computing power to the edge of networks so data can be processed and analyzed faster.

Microsoft posted the video below that explains more about Azure Event Grid’s capabilities:

Now that it’s generally available, Azure Event Grid is being offered with a guaranteed 99.99 percent availability. The service is also available in more regions than before.

Image: Microsoft