Scheduled and Continuous Tasks with Microsoft Azure Web Jobs

Hosting Websites on Windows Azure is a great option and most of the websites starts with “platform as a service”. You just deploy, and it’s done. The VM is invisible and the site is always up.

However, there’s not yet been a good solution under web sites for doing schedule jobs and batch work in the background. Till now, people consider hosting websites on a VM (IAAS) when they need “cron” or “scheduled jobs”. This used to be a lot of work because the VM now needs full attention from you. You need to manage it like your own server.

With Azure WebJobs, Azure Web Sites support running jobs.  It enables you to run programs or scripts in your web site in one of three ways: on demand, continuously, or on a schedule. There is no additional cost to use Microsoft Azure WebJobs unless you wish to enable the Always On feature.

Take a look at step by step tutorial to enable WebJobs for your azure websites at the URL below:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-create-web-jobs/

 

On top of my mind, I can think of few use cases for WebJobs that comes naturally with internet of things as noted below.

Use Cases:

1. Image Processing

2. Email scheduler

3. Twitter Scheduler

4. Notification & Alerts Scheduler

5. Order Processing

6. Batch Jobs (File Exchanges)

 

 

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