We are adopting an Azure Functions-based architecture for our customers, some of them requiring that the AF run on-premises only.
In the Microsoft Azure Functions docs they refer to running Azure Functions on-premises for development purposes only.
To my understanding, there they are just listing the most common use cases for running on-premises a service that gets its strength from cloud computing; that should not exclude a production use for on-premise runtime. I am not reading anywhere to avoid using them on-prem in production.
Hence the question: should we avoid using on-prem Azure Functions in production?
Thanks in advance
The main issue you might run into is support- while the host is open source and can absolutely be run on-premises, it likely hasn't been tested in the specific environment that your customer is running and it may be difficult to get updates to resolve that prioritized with the product team.
An alternative to consider might be to use the Webjobs SDK outside of the Functions host. I have done this in the past where I needed to deploy code in a hybrid scenario and since Webjobs are essentially console apps I was able to run them as simple Windows services. Functions relies so heavily on the Webjobs SDK, converting them into Functions apps would require minimal code changes.
Essentially my project structure looked like this (I was working in .NET):