Microsoft debuts Azure Event Grid, an event routing service that complements Microsoft's existing “serverless” offerings Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps
Build apps faster with a serverless architecture Richard Seroter / InfoQ : Microsoft Ships Azure Event Grid for Unified Event Processing Kurt Marko / diginomica : Microsoft Azure Event Grid - first to tackle the event management morass in serverless programming Microsoft Azure : Introducing Azure Event Grid - an event service for modern applications Suzanne Choney / The Fire Hose : Meet Azure Event Grid, which manages events from any source to any designation for any application Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE : Microsoft debuts Azure Event Grid to enable more automated apps Mary Branscombe / The New Stack : With Event Grid, Microsoft Provides the Missing Half of Azure Serverless Computing Tom Krazit / GeekWire : Microsoft continues its push into serverless tech with Azure Event Grid Pradeep / MSPoweruser : Microsoft announces Azure Event Grid, a fully-managed event routing service Blair Hanley Frank / VentureBeat : Microsoft announces serverless event routing service to connect applications Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet : Microsoft takes the wraps off new Azure Event Grid service Brandy Betz / Seeking Alpha : Microsoft launches Azure Event Grid
Context & Ripple Effects
This debut completes a stack Microsoft has been assembling since the preview of Azure Functions in April 2016 positioned it against AWS Lambda. Functions gave Microsoft compute-on-events; Logic Apps gave it workflow orchestration — but wiring events from sources into those services still required custom plumbing.
Azure Event Grid fills that gap with a fully-managed routing layer that carries events from any source to any destination, and the follow-through was fast: Microsoft took the service generally available across roughly ten Azure regions by January 2018.
First-order effects
- Developers building on Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps can now subscribe to events from any source without writing their own routing or polling code, shortening the path from event to action.
Second-order effects
- AWS faces pressure to match a managed event-routing primitive at the platform level rather than leaving integration work to Lambda customers, raising the bar for what counts as a complete serverless offering.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hyperscale cloud competition shifts further from raw compute pricing toward the breadth of fully-managed glue services, where each new managed layer locks application logic deeper into one provider's ecosystem.
The trend: Cloud providers are racing to wrap every stage of event-driven application development in managed services, turning serverless from isolated functions into integrated platforms.