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region = Console.ReadLine();
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}
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var translatedSentence = await PostAPI(host + route, subscriptionKey, region, `Hello World!`);
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Console.WriteLine(translatedSentence);
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Console.WriteLine(`Press any key to continue...`);
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Console.ReadKey();
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}
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For further information, visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/translator/reference/v3-0-languages.
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This is a perfect example of how easily and quickly you can use services such as this to architect your projects. This ease of use not only accelerates project development but also opens up new possibilities for innovation and enhanced user experiences.
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SaaS — just sign in and get started!
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SaaS is probably the easiest way to use cloud-based services. The application you need is already available on the cloud, and you need just to configure and use it! Cloud players provide many good options that solve common problems for their end users in a company. From email services to comprehensive business management tools, SaaS offers a wide array of applications that you can tailor to your various business needs.
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A good example of this type of service is Office 365. The key point with these platforms is that you do not need to worry about application maintenance. This is particularly convenient in scenarios where your team is totally focused on developing the core business of the application. For example, if your solution needs to deliver good reports, maybe you can design them using Power BI (which is included in Office 365). Thus, integrating Office 365 into your solution allows for seamless data analysis and reporting, immediately enhancing the overall efficiency and productivity of your business operations.
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A SaaS solution can be customized in various ways. The most powerful technique is the addition of custom plugins. For instance, you can customize your Office 365 tenant by adding various kinds of plugins that are available in public repositories and/or by developing your own custom plugins.
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It is also worth pointing out that if you decide to invest in custom plugins, you already have, say, 90% of the application running and stable, so both the initial investment and the time to market are incredibly reduced.
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In summary, on the one hand, SaaS offers immediately sophisticated and proven solutions, but on the other hand, SaaS offers very limited customization options. So, how do you decide whether to use a SaaS solution?
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Evaluate existing solutions: First of all, you need to verify if a SaaS that matches your needs already exists.
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Consider customization and integration: Then, you need to verify if the selected options can be adapted to your needs and the investment required to adapt them.
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Analyze cost implications: At this point, you must analyze the impact of the inevitable compromises you will be forced to accept, as well as the overall cost implied by each candidate SaaS adoption, which includes the overall cost of the impact it has on your organization.
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Review security and compliance: You also need to verify that the users/security model used by the SaaS is compatible with your needs and that, in general, the application fulfills all constraints required by your organization.
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Assess vendor reliability and support: The impact of having a strong dependency on the SaaS supplier is a key factor in your final decision. Keep in mind that once you incorporate a SaaS solution into your business, it might be very difficult to move to a different solution – that is, the contractual power of your supplier might rise over time to unacceptable levels. For the same reason, an unreliable supplier (for instance, a young start-up) or a supplier that can’t offer adequate product support might cause unacceptable damage.
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Plan for scalability and future growth: You must also consider the future of your organization. Thus, you must also verify if the candidate options are scalable and can be adapted to your growing needs and traffic.
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Test the solution: Finally, you need to test the chosen solution in practice in a staging environment, verifying that your overall analysis and predictions are correct.
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Another pretty good example of a SaaS platform is Azure DevOps. As a software architect, before Azure DevOps, you needed to install and configure Team Foundation Server (TFS) (or even older tools like Microsoft Visual SourceSafe) for your team to work with a common repository and an application life cycle management tool.
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We used to spend a lot of time just working either on preparing the server for TFS installation or upgrading and continuously maintaining the TFS already installed. This is no longer needed due to the simplicity of SaaS Azure DevOps.
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Understanding what serverless means
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A serverless solution is a solution where the focus is not on where the code runs. Even in a “serverless” solution, there is always a server. The thing is that you just do not know or care which server your code executes on. The main advantage of serverless is that you have zero fixed monthly costs, and you are billed just for your traffic.
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However, there are also other advantages. For instance, in a serverless solution, you have a very fast, simple, and agile application life cycle since almost all serverless code is stateless and loosely coupled with the remainder of the system. Some authors refer to this as Function as a Service (FaaS).
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Of course, the server runs somewhere. The key point here is that you do not need to worry about this or even scalability. This will enable you to focus completely on your app’s business logic. Again, the world needs fast development and good customer experiences at the same time. The more you focus on customer needs, the better!
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FaaS offers the shortest time-to-market and the lowest cost threshold, together with large scalability possibilities. So, they are convenient in situations where it is extremely difficult to forecast the application workload or when the application workload has a high and difficult-to-forecast variance.
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Suppose, for instance, you are looking for a solution for mass email sending to connect to your application. If your applications also handle marketing campaigns, there would be traffic peaks that might also be 100 times your average traffic. A FaaS solution might be able to easily cover these huge peaks without impacting the average costs you have outside of them.
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Conversely, in a similar situation, PaaS or IaaS would force you to move to a higher price tier if you don’t need it during your average periods, just during your marketing campaign peaks.
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If the workload becomes more stable, and it is easier to draw reliable lower and higher bounds, FaaS becomes less convenient due to its higher cost on higher workloads. As an example, Amazon Prime recently publicized its savings by switching from FaaS to IaaS.
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Unluckily, moving from FaaS to PaaS or IaaS is not easy since FaaS code is strictly tied to the chosen FaaS solution.
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This issue can be partially mitigated by avoiding overly fragmented FaaS code made of small functions and, instead, using a few functions that trigger the execution of bigger conventional software modules enclosed inside the FaaS solution. This way, moving to a different FaaS, or to IaaS/PaaS, would require just rewriting a few FaaS mains while keeping the bigger software modules they call unchanged. Unfortunately, the performance penalty of waking up an inactive function is incompatible with the usage of complex frameworks inside each function, so fragmentation is unavoidable.
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In my experience, FaaS proves to be useful either in the early stages of a presumably high-traffic but low-complexity application or for low-complexity applications like our previous email-sending application, which are specifically designed to handle high and difficult-to-forecast peaks. In fact, in these applications, near-complete code rewrites are acceptable since the investment for the code development is low compared with the savings implied by an almost immediate time-to-market and by efficacious handling of big and hard-to-forecast traffic peeks.
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In Chapter 16, Working with Serverless – Azure Functions, you will explore one of the best serverless implementations that Microsoft provides in Azure – Azure Functions. There, we will focus on how you can develop serverless solutions and learn about their advantages and disadvantages.
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The following subsections compare IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and FaaS along several axes.
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Comparing IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and FaaS
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In the previous sections, we described various types of solutions offered by all main cloud providers, with their advantages and disadvantages. The table below summarizes the main advantages offered by each of them, assigning a note between 1 (less good) and 4 (very good) to five axes.
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Time-to-Market
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Customization possibility
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Maintenance effort
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Scalability
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Cost
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IaaS
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1
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4
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1
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1
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4
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PaaS
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2
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3
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2
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2
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3