Session Abstract

Serverless makes it easy to start small. Building a security service that has to process large workloads reliably, survive partial failures and remain financially predictable is a different problem entirely. In this session, we will look at the architecture behind a real-world cloud security SaaS built heavily on Azure Functions and Cosmos DB, and examine the decisions that mattered once the system moved beyond simple request-response workloads. We will explore practical challenges including long-running and fan-out workloads, Cosmos DB partitioning and RU/s consumption, retry and idempotency patterns, Microsoft API throttling, concurrency control, failure recovery and multi-region resilience. Just as importantly, we will look at the trade-offs. When should you increase throughput rather than optimise queries? How aggressively should Functions scale when the API you depend on is throttling you? When does retry logic improve resilience, and when does it simply create a very expensive feedback loop? Using real architectural examples and code patterns, this session will show how to design serverless workloads that remain resilient under pressure without allowing reliability or cloud cost to spiral out of control. Attendees will leave with practical patterns they can apply to Azure Functions, Cosmos DB and other event-driven SaaS or enterprise workloads.

Note to event organizers

Not a sales pitch for our product! These are real lessons learned from building a global SaaS on top of modern cloud services.

David O'Brien

David is the founder of ARGOS Cloud Security (htttps://argos-security.io) and has previously held a Microsoft MVP award for 9 years, including the prestigious MVP for Azure. A regular speaker at international conferences, meetups, and user groups he combines his interest to travel the world with his passion to share IT stories with the community. He has been blogging about cloud, security, and automation for well over a decade and regularly delivers in-person training courses across the world. Outside of IT David is an active aviator with over 20 years' flying experience, and an aspiring Strongman athlete.

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