What is Function Compute

Application scenario

Why use Function Compute

Example

Build web applications

Function Compute provides ready-to-use templates for popular web applications that help you quickly build and iterate your applications. As your business expands, you can also use features such as log query, performance monitoring, and alerting to ensure your web applications run efficiently and reliably.

Function Compute is highly elastic, which makes it ideal for web applications that handle traffic bursts, such as during sales promotions.

You can use the Flask framework template to create a function and efficiently develop your web application. You can also migrate an existing web application to a web function. For more information, see Use a web function to quickly create a web application.

Real-time data processing

As an event-driven service, Function Compute can be automatically triggered by various sources, such as HTTP requests, OSS, and message queues. For example, you can use an OSS trigger to process uploaded files in real time. You can also orchestrate multiple functions, message queues, and databases to collect large amounts of data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices. When your scenario changes, you can adapt your application by modifying event triggers and integrating new components without making major changes to your business code.

Function Compute integrates with multiple Alibaba Cloud services to help you easily build an event-driven architecture for various data processing scenarios.

You can use Function Compute to automatically decompress ZIP files that are uploaded to OSS. For more information, see Use Function Compute to automatically decompress ZIP files uploaded to OSS.

AI model service

After an AI model is trained, you can use Function Compute to provide an inference service. You can package the data model into a function that runs only when a user request is received.

The GPU-accelerated instances in Function Compute allow developers to focus on their business logic without managing the underlying GPU infrastructure. This greatly simplifies the implementation process.

You can use a Large Language Model (LLM) container image and a GPU function to quickly deploy a chatbot application. For more information, see Deploy a Google Gemma model service at a low cost using Function Compute.

Audio and video processing

You can combine Function Compute and CloudFlow to orchestrate your business processes using a visual interface. Compared with traditional solutions, this approach offers significant advantages in performance, cost, and engineering efficiency.

Function Compute can provision many computing resources in a short period, which makes it ideal for computation-intensive scenarios such as image, audio, and video processing.

You can define a workflow to schedule multiple functions in parallel and build a high-performance video transcoding system. For more information, see Build an elastic and highly available audio and video processing system based on a serverless architecture.