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If you’re looking to quickly and easily build out the functionality of your website, or if you’re new to development, REST APIs are a great place to start. By allowing different applications and application components to interact with each other, APIs save developers the trouble of writing custom code from scratch. This makes them an almost indispensable tool for programming.

As more companies embrace digital initiatives, businesses must work hard to not only find an audience for their site, but keep users engaged and interested. However, competing for clicks is becoming increasingly challenging, leaving little room for poor performance in speed and SEO and furthering the importance of social media in driving traffic and gaining conversions. That’s why tools like static site generation (SSG) and server-side rendering (SSR) are gaining (or in the case of SSR, regaining) popularity as a way to optimize performance, SEO, social media sharing, and other business drivers.

Low latency and security are both crucial for finance apps. Unfortunately, some of the measures designed to secure applications can negatively impact performance, resulting in a tradeoff that financial companies can’t afford to make. That’s why Azion’s Edge Computing Platform is not only designed to maximize performance, but deliver robust protection for applications deployed at the edge.

With the exponential growth of Azion, we had to find a way to make these web content processes easier and make the monitoring of this scale possible.

From learning management systems like Blackboard and Canvas to smart classrooms and educational toys, schools are increasingly incorporating technology into their daily practices. In 2020, these efforts reached new heights as schools across the world embraced remote learning to curb the spread of Covid-19.

If you’re looking for something to celebrate this Earth Day, consider this: despite steady increases in Internet-connected devices and data consumption, green computing initiatives across the technology sector have managed to prevent a corresponding rise in energy consumption. But that doesn’t mean companies should stop doing their part to reduce their CO2 footprint. On the contrary, as new technologies continue to enable more connectivity than ever, it’s increasingly important for businesses to offset and drastically reduce their resource use through green computing initiatives.

As new technologies like 5G and edge computing steadily move us toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by automation, robotics, and machine learning, the need for real-time data processing is becoming increasingly important. From businesses that rely on Big Data to glean customer insights to IoT applications that leverage machine-learning and AI, we are generating a torrent of data—much of which must be instantly analyzed and acted upon to ensure its relevance.

As part of our official release of JavaScript support for Edge Functions, we’ve rounded up and summarized past blog posts on Edge Computing and Edge Functions. This primer will give readers a conceptual view of how our Edge Computing platform is set up and how Edge Functions work. In addition, it covers Edge Functions' attributes and features, discusses its key benefits, and describes the underlying technologies that help to make it great.

One of the key advantages of serverless is that much of the complexity of development is abstracted away, enabling developers to focus on what matters most: crafting the best possible functionality and user experience. However, from time to time, we at Azion like to share with our readers some of the techniques we use under the hood to deliver the best possible performance, security, cost-efficiency, and resource use. Foremost among these tools is Google’s V8 Engine. The V8 Engine is embedded in our core technology, Azion Cells, and used under the hood of our new serverless computing product, Edge Functions, which is now available with JavaScript support.

The history of JavaScript is, in many ways, the history of the modern Internet. Anyone who remembers the static, clunky, and slow-loading web pages of the early Internet—or even caught a glimpse of them via the Wayback Machine—has a sense of just how much web development has evolved since the 1990s. Interactive elements such as animation, fillable forms, and even the ability to scroll through articles like this one are largely due to the rise of JavaScript—a programming language that was initially developed in 10 days and conceived as a “sidekick” to Java.

By providing managed resources and only charging for what is used, serverless enables companies to get more serving resources for their money. This post will provide a beginner’s look at serverless computing, from its evolution, benefits, and implications for enterprises to a look at how Azion’s Edge Functions brings serverless computing to the edge.

Serverless computing provides a cost-effective way for companies to leverage the power of edge computing by eliminating upfront fees and outsourcing the cost of operating and maintaining servers to cloud providers. Not only does serverless computing reduce capital expenditures and maintenance costs, performing serverless workloads at the edge has significant long-term cost advantages as a result of the reduced distance data has to travel, necessitating less bandwidth and computational power than processing in cloud providers’ centralized data centers.

In past years, serverless and edge computing have quickly risen to the forefront of many technological discussions, due to the widespread adoption of microservices, the emergence of 5G, and the ever-increasing demand for better user experiences. However, despite all the buzz and interest around serverless and edge computing, the concept still remains unclear to newcomers and IT professionals alike.

The need for agile applications, on-demand scalability, high performance, and round-the-clock availability have all driven increased adoption of cloud computing, Edge Computing, and serverless architecture. Despite the benefits of these technologies, some companies are still hesitant to adopt them due to the fear of vendor lock-in. Knowing how to mitigate the risk of lock-in can help companies avoid unexpected costs and complications as they migrate to the edge and the cloud.

Previously in this series of posts on microservices, we discussed the features and traits necessary to next-generation applications. As 5G and Edge Computing infrastructure are built out, ultra low-latency and reliable applications and services will become increasingly common, accelerating already high user expectations for performance. In addition, with more people working, shopping, and learning online than ever, strict security measures will be needed to meet compliance requirements and ensure consumer privacy.

In the last post in this series, we compared serverless and containers for modern applications, discussing many of the advantages of working with serverless. However, serverless is not without its challenges. In order to get the most out of serverless architecture, it is important to select the right serverless platform and adhere to best practices.

Wordpress has been around for 17 years and helped shape the internet into what it is today. Launched in 2003, by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, it aimed to be "an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system", according to their own blog. Hosting almost one third of the internet's webpages, from blogs and news sites to online stores, Wordpress is synonyms to content creating on the web today.

Containers and serverless are two options for deploying microservices, the architecture used in modern applications. Microservices provide the needed agility and performance for today’s applications and are optimized for the cloud, making them crucial to a business’s growth and readiness for the future as 5G and edge infrastructure deployments become increasingly prevalent.

Anyone who’s ever postponed installing a new OS to the newest version can attest to the technical issues that arise when older systems are not updated. Continuing to use outmoded technology can lead to a world of problems, from security issues to poor performance and reliability. As a result, the need to modernize is clear to many businesses. However, the process for modernization is decidedly less straightforward, with strategies that run the gamut from “lifting and shifting” an application onto newer infrastructure to replacing or rewriting the old application from scratch.

Microservices were once an alternative to monolithic application architecture. They presented a new mode of development with its own set of risks and rewards. Now, we are reaching a tipping point where it’s no longer a question of whether to migrate, but when to migrate. However, migrating is a challenging process that can pose problems if executed poorly. This post will cover why microservices are necessary, the challenges of migrating to microservices, and how to devise a plan for migration.

One of the buzziest topics that exists in computing today is over the modernization of legacy applications. With the rise of 5G, Edge Computing, and serverless architecture, many companies are wondering whether--and how--to rethink applications for today’s digital landscape. To help shed some light on these concerns, we’re introducing a series of posts that will discuss application modernization from a variety of business and technical perspectives, with a focus on one of the most widely discussed aspects of modernization, the use of microservices.

First introduced in 2014, JAMStack is a more modern approach to building fast, secure, highly scalable and well-performing websites and apps. Instead of a commercial offering, JAMStack is a community-based set of best practices and workflows to maximize website-building efficiency.

In a previous post, we announced Early Access for Edge Functions, a new product for building and running event-driven serverless functions. After three months of Early Access, with dozens of use cases already implemented, the beta release of Edge Functions is now available to all our customers with JavaScript support.

You’ve probably heard (many times) that one of the biggest advantages of serverless compute is that you don’t have to manage your application’s infrastructure, freeing you to focus on the front end without worrying about things like backend security or provisioning servers. This, however, presupposes that you are not a compulsive worrier about performance and efficiency of your applications.

In our previous posts, we’ve looked at 5G from the perspective of networks: how they’re being deployed, what deployment entails, and how MEC can help service providers implement 5G and achieve 5G performance standards. However, the way most people will experience 5G isn’t through the theoretical capabilities of a network, but through the performance of devices and applications that run on those networks.