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What on Earth is ERP ‘Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are designed to address the problem of fragmentation of information or “islands of information" in business organizations.’ International Journal of Operations & Production Management ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a software suite that automates and decreases the manual labor. It allows your company to perform in a cost-effective manner. ERP systems include a set of software modules, which manage the information for a separate business function or a group of those. It connects departments to one internal database and centralizes all the information. The database in turn exchanges data flow with the modules. For example, every month we have to inform the payroll office how much has each worker done. Employees should concentrate on their direct duties. By means of ERP automatization we minimize their involvement to the task and its tracked implementation. ‘I don’t see how any company can do effective supply chain management without ERP.’ ERP - Making It Happen To see the whole picture of what can be done by Enterprise Resource Planning alone, enjoy the graph: Source: Panorama report on ERP systems and Enterprise software So, make a step forward and simplify the process by implementing ERP systems: ERP analyzes the functional side of your enterprise and along the way automates and/or removes the irrelevant business functions. Each department has its own unique software that automates simple processes. Simplified working process. The info is already in the database, ready to be used. That will make the information exchange between the inner systems simpler and more robust. The modules have an access to each other’s outputs, while reduced time and effort consumption please the eye. Increased performance and stable implementation These make all segments of the company system fruitful; removes the spots of possible mistakes (e.g. human factor) and saves a great deal of time. Source: Panorama report on ERP systems and Enterprise software So, the main reason why people involve so much effort and money into the software of ERP is the need for constant improvement. The enhanced performance will push business processes increasing the efficiency and drawing customers’ attention. Visually, the influence of ERP systems looks like that: Source: Panorama report on ERP systems and Enterprise software Cloud-based ERP Today, a number of modern companies prefer this type of ERP. And BelItSoft isn’t an exception. However, because the security here is still questionable, some would prefer to have their data behind the walls. People still are suspicious of the Clouds. According to the Panorama report, 72% of respondents were frightened of the possible risks of data loss, and 12% of a possible security breach. Pros: Fast and easy data sharing+the access is seamless and handy. Saves money (no need in servicing and specific equipment) Good choice for small companies that are looking to start without going into too much technical aspects of setting their own hosting Cons: Deprives a full control over the data (hosting-provider is the one responsible for stable work and data integrity) Data security is in the hands of the vendor Still expensive: the price of VM in the Cloud is higher than in the local data-center On-premise ERP On-premise hosting means using your own resources for the software deployment (you need your equipment to make it work). However, you may also use VPS (Virtual Private Server) or VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server). As my interlocutor noticed, “To keep the machine working you need to hire people that could manage fixing whenever it breaks. Moreover, the space taken is also a reason to think your choice over". So, to make sure nothing will spoil “the moment of truth", the on-premise ERP holder should think of: Pros: Maximum security for your corporate data Full control 24/7 (physical access to any data on the server) Excellent for large and mid-sized enterprises which have a data control and safety in the first place Cons: Additional expenses (hiring specialists for servicing the equipment, space, safety, electricity) Complexities with data access for the distant branches OPEX (operating expenditure) is more profitable than CAPEX (capital exp.) you have buying facilities Ready-to-go vs ERP from the scratch. Budget decision Today you can purchase everything effortlessly. You may choose the way of the least resistance and check out what ERP software has been developed years ago and is still relevant. Source: https://selecthub.com/erp-software/ ‘However, we can’t say that the purchased product is the cure that works straight away. There are always things to change that make developers remove lots of discrepancies. It also happens that some existing modules that are not necessary anymore may be eliminated.’ Dmitry Garbar So, before the implementation, developers have to straighten everything up, adjust and test the results - to make sure the work is done the way you’ve expected. ‘I've never come across ready-to-use ERP software that fits a client perfectly. Often, they're not entirely willing to change their business processes to fit the ERP product. There's always room for the idea of a customized ERP solution.’ Dmitry Garbar Let’s sum up the information. The advantages of the ready-to-go ERP are: Short-term savings (by avoiding high costs associated with customization). Faster implementation Stable knowledge support (lots of outside experts on the software who can provide long-term training and advice) Software Sophistication (few bugs, industry-specific solutions and extensive elaboration) And the disadvantages are the following: The need for adjustments and additional development May be difficult to customize it to your processes You have less control over the product (software vendor holds the rights to the code) Developing ERP system from scratch. Some entrepreneurs may find it much more difficult to wisely develop an ERP core that holds their systems together. Firstly, you need to analyze what and how do people do their job in each department. “Each role that is performed in the company is under the question of automatization", Garbar said. “So to get the ball rolling, business analytics (BA) have a chat with every employee in the company to understand the mechanics better". And after the picture of company’s “back-end" has been drawn, we are ready to discuss the time frame, costs, individual desires, and suggestions. Source: ERP - Making It Happen. The overall process builds a totally unique architecture that is capable to adapt to the further changes in the company’s work. However, that coin has two sides. Pros: You get a unique software tailored to the specific nature of your business You have a full control over the software code You save money on the long-term prospects Intellectual property rights to the ERP increase company valuation. Cons: Long development time High costs compared to off-the-shelf solution May become obsolete by the time of implementation The costs and time frames Source: Panorama report on ERP systems and Enterprise software The final cost for the software is always formed individually and depends on the range of factors. Speaking of ERP system developing, the price includes: Company size (the number of employees, branches, locations and so on) The industry of the business Solution (industry-specific and customized, or general and flexible) Resources required (external consulting, user training, task tracking, etc.) Specific requirements For instance, if you expect to see a sophisticated custom ERP system, you may not find complete designs and architecture that will fully satisfy your desires. In such cases, the implementation may require heavy customization and third-party add-ons, which will increase the costs. But even if the price was named, it can’t be steady when push comes to the software expected to support your business for decades: Source: Panorama report on ERP systems and Enterprise software In numbers, USA companies charge from $10K up to $10 million and more: Small businesses: $10K - $150K Mid-sized: $150K - $500K Large enterprises: $1 million - $10+ million ‘Considering Belitsoft, it’s difficult to name even the average price we offer. The projects we are involved into are diversive and usually require a wide spectrum of services: from the company size and technology team to personal wishes and preferable time frames.’ Dmitry Garbar At Belitsoft, the effort on the project varies from 2000 hours to 96 man-months. And a plethora of those that need ongoing support and constant improvements. The question that doubts is shall the project pay off? Well, let’s see: Source: Panorama report on ERP systems and Enterprise software Time. If only “as fast as you can" would be taken literally and fulfilled right away. But in the real IT world all we have is to nod hearing 25, 32, 48+ months from the developer. But what takes them so long? Size. Same as with the costs. The size of your company, the amount of employees, and many other factors influence the time spent on analysis, chosen technology, the type of data storage etc. The industry you are operating in Types of ERP. The time needed for the final implementation of purchased and adjusted ERP on the Cloud differs from the on-premise solution tailored directly for the business you run. Personal desires. Any additional functions you want to see in the final product need extra time for development and adoption Respect the deadlines. Not many IT companies may boast for their accurate relationship with deadlines and set time-frames. According to the 2017 report, project duration was over scheduled by 59% in total: Source: Panorama report on ERP systems and Enterprise software Just face the fact that such a giant as Enterprise Resource Planning solutions can’t be developed in a day. It needs a constant updating and support, as an ordinary child does. Consider ERP as a life-time project that has a huge impact on everything you love. The best technologies for ERP implementation Source: https://www.cuba-platform.com/ The choice of technology arises from the size of a company you run. At Belitsoft, we provide PHP solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, and Java or .NET solutions for larger companies. If your project specifically requires Java expertise, you also have the option to hire dedicated Java developers from our skilled team. hire dedicated java developers Developing a desktop application for a Football Federation we’ve chosen .NET - as a prevalent technology - accompanied by C# and PHP. Creation of the ERP system for Granite Industry vendors involved Laravel, HTML and PHP. Angular JS coupled with .NET is a good replacement for Java to build financial software ‘One independent company carried out the technical audit of the project we were going to engage in. The focus was on specifications and architecture. In the end, they acknowledged only Java and .NET as the most secured technologies.’ As a programming language, Java shows itself as a perfect tool in finance and enterprise development. Amongst its advantages, the most substantial one is versatility. Java is essentially reliable and proven partner when it comes to the building software castles, skyscrapers and highway bridges. However, no one stops mid-sized companies to choose Java as well. It is a balanced language with well-oiled filling for the diverse purposes. Conclusion Two words: simplification and automation. Enterprise Resource Planning systems: Is a complex process that requires a distant understanding of the target. Requires re-orienting and teaching staff to work within a totally new environment. Transforms your enterprise into a computerized structural body managed by a set of software. modules covering the entire business. Provides the techniques accompanied by effective forecasting, planning, and scheduling processes. Makes the data exchange between modules much easier and more systematic. Helps to avoid repeated data entering. Automates business functions so that business processes go flawlessly.

Belitsoft is a team of Azure migration and modernization experts with a proven track record and portfolio of projects to show for it. We offer comprehensive application modernization services, which include workload analysis, compatibility checks, and the creation of a sound migration strategy. Further, we will take all the necessary steps to ensure your successful transition to Azure cloud. Planning your migration to Azure is an important process as it involves choosing whether to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or rebuild your applications. A laid-out Azure migration strategy helps put these decisions in perspective. Read on to find our step-by-step guide for the cloud migration process, plus a breakdown of key migration models. An investment in on-premises hosting and data centers can be a waste of money nowadays, because cloud technologies provide significant advantages, such as usage-based pricing and the capacity to easily scale up and down. In addition, your downtime risks will be near-zero in comparison with on-premises infrastructure. Migration to the cloud from the on-premises model requires time, so the earlier you start, the better. Dmitry Baraishuk Chief Innovation Officer at Belitsoft on Forbes.com Cloud Migration Process to Microsoft Azure We would like to share our recommended approach for migrating applications and workloads to Azure. It is based on Microsoft's guidelines and outlines the key steps of the Azure Migration process. 1. Strategize and plan your migration process The first thing you need to do to lay out a sound migration strategy is to identify and organize discussions among the key business stakeholders. They will need to document precise business outcomes expected from the migration process. The team is also required to understand and discover the underlying technical aspects of cloud adoption and factor them into the documented strategy. Next, you will need to come up with a strategic plan that will prioritize your goals and objectives and serve as a practical guide for cloud adoption. It begins with translating strategy into more tangible aspects like choosing which applications and workloads have higher priority for migration. You move on deeper into business and technical elements and document them into a plan used to forecast, budget, and implement your Azure migration strategy. In the end, you'll be able to calculate your total cost of ownership with Azure’s TCO calculator which is a handy tool for planning your savings and expenses for your migration project. 2. Evaluate workloads and prepare for migration After creating the migration plan you will need to assess your environment and categorize all of your servers, virtual machines, and application dependencies. You will need to look at such key components of your infrastructure as: Virtual Networks: Analyze your existing workloads for performance, security, and stability and make sure you match these metrics with equivalent resources in Azure cloud. This way you can have the same experience as with the on-premise data center. Evaluate whether you will need to run your own DNS via Active Directory and which parts of your application will require subnets. Storage Capacity: Select the right Azure storage services to support the required number of operations per second for virtual machines with intensive I/O workloads. You can prioritize usage based on the nature of the data and how often users access it. Rarely accessed (cold data) could be placed in slow storage solutions. Computing resources: Analyze how you can win by migrating to flexible Azure Virtual Machines. With Azure, you are no longer limited by your physical server’s capabilities and can dynamically scale your applications along with shifting performance requirements. Azure Autoscale service allows you to automatically distribute resources based on metrics and keeps you from wasting money on redundant computing power. To make life easier, Azure has created tools to streamline the assessment process: Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s current recommended solution and is an end-to-end tool that you can use to assess and migrate servers, virtual machines, infrastructure, applications, and data to Azure. It can be a bit overwhelming and requires you to transfer your data to Azure’s servers. Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit can be a lighter solution for people who are just at the start of their cloud migration journey. It needs to be installed and stores data on-premise but is much simpler and gives a great picture of server compatibility with Azure and the required Azure VM sizes. Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment tool Is another great tool that guides the user all the way through the assessment with a series of questions. Besides the questions, it also provides additional information with regard to the question. In the end, it gives you a checklist for moving to the cloud. Create your migration landing zone. As a final step, before you move on to the migration process you need to prepare your Azure environment by creating a landing zone. A landing zone is a collection of cloud services used for hosting, operating, and governing workloads migrated to the cloud. Think of it as a blueprint for your future cloud setup which you can further scale to your requirements. 3. Migrate your applications to Azure Cloud  First of all, you can simply replace some of your applications with SaaS products hosted by Azure. For instance, you can move your email and communication-related workloads to Office 365 (Microsoft 365). Document management solutions can be replaced with Sharepoint. Finally, messaging, voice, and video-shared communications can step over to Microsoft Teams. For other workloads that are irreplaceable and need to be moved to the cloud, we recommend an iterative approach. Luckily, we can take advantage of Azure hybrid cloud solutions so there’s no need for a rapid transition to the cloud. Here are some tips for migrating to Azure: Start with a proof of concept: Choose a few applications that would be easiest to migrate, then conduct data migration testing on your migration plan and document your progress. Identifying any potential issues at an early stage is critical, as it allows you to fine-tune your strategy before proceeding. Collect insights and apply them when you move on to more complex workloads. Top choices for the first move include basic web apps and portals. Advance with more challenging workloads: Use the insights from the previous step to migrate workloads with a high business impact. These are often apps that record business transactions with high processing rates. They also include strongly regulated workloads. Approach most difficult applications last: These are high-value asset applications that support all business operations. They are usually not easily replaced or modernized, so they require a special approach, or in most cases - complete redesign and development. 4. Optimize performance in Azure cloud After you have successfully migrated your solutions to Azure, the next step is to look for ways to optimize their performance in the cloud. This includes revisions of the app’s design, tweaking chosen Azure services, configuring infrastructure, and managing subscription costs. This step also includes possible modifications when after you’ve rehosted your application, you decide to refactor and make it more compatible with the cloud. You may even want to completely rearchitect the solution with Azure cloud services. Besides this, some vital optimizations include: Monitoring resource usage and performance with tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Traffic Manager and providing an appropriate response to critical issues. Data protection using measures such as disaster recovery, encryption, and data back-ups. Maintaining high security standards by applying centralized security policies, eliminating exposure to threats with antivirus and malware protection, and responding to attacks using event management. Azure migration strategies The strategies for migrating to the Azure cloud depend on how much you are willing to modernize your applications. You can choose to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or rebuild apps based on your business needs and goals. 1. Rehost or Lift and Shift strategy Rehosting means moving applications from on-premise to the cloud without any code or architecture design changes. This type of migration fits apps that need to be quickly moved to the cloud, as well as legacy software that supports key business operations. Choose this method if you don’t have much time to modernize your workload and plan on making the big changes after moving to the cloud. Advantages: Speedy migration with no risk of bugs and breakdown issues. Disadvantages: Azure cloud service usage may be limited by compatibility issues. 2. Refactor or repackaging strategy During refactoring, slight changes are made to the application so that it becomes more compatible with cloud infrastructure. This can be done if you want to avoid maintenance challenges and would like to take advantage of services like Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure App Service, or Azure Kubernetes Service. Advantages: It’s a lot faster and easier than a complete redesign of architecture, allows to improve the application’s performance in the cloud, and to take advantage of advanced DevOps automation tools. Disadvantages: Less efficient than moving to improved design patterns like the transition to microservices from monolith architecture. 3. Rearchitect strategy Some legacy software may not be compatible with the Azure cloud environment. In this case, the application needs a complete redesign to a cloud-native architecture. It often involves migrating to microservices from the monolith and moving relational and nonrelational databases to a managed cloud storage solution. Advantages: Applications leverage the full power of Azure cloud with high performance, scalability, and flexibility. Disadvantages: Migrating may be tricky and pose challenges, including issues in the early stages like breakdowns and service disruptions. 4. Rebuild strategy The rebuild strategy takes things even further and involves taking apart the old application and developing a new one from scratch using Azure Platform as a service (PaaS) services. It allows taking advantage of cloud-native technologies like Azure Containers, Functions and Logic Apps to create the application layer and Azure SQL Database for the data tier. A cloud-native approach gives you complete freedom to use Azure’s extensive catalog of products to optimize your application’s performance. Advantages: Allows for business innovation by leveraging AI, blockchain, and IoT technologies. Disadvantages: A fully cloud-native approach may pose some limitations in features and functionality as compared to custom-built applications. Each modernization approach has pros and cons as well as different costs, risks and time frames. That is the essence of the risk-return principle, and you have to balance between less effort and risks but more value and outputs. The challenge is that as a business owner, especially without tech expertise, you don't know how to modernize legacy applications. Who's creating a modernization plan? Who's executing this plan? How do you find staff with the necessary experience or choose the right external partner? How much does legacy software modernization cost? Conducting business and technical audits helps you find your modernization path. Dmitry Baraishuk Chief Innovation Officer at Belitsoft on Forbes.com Professional support for your Azure migration Every migration process is unique and requires a personal approach. It is never a one-way street and there are a lot of nuances and challenges on the path to cloud adoption. Often, having an experienced migration partner can seriously simplify and accelerate your Azure cloud migration journey.

Benefits of Azure Functions With Azure Functions, enterprises offload operational burden to Azure or outsource infrastructure management to Microsoft. There are no servers/VMs for operations teams to manage. No patching OS, configuring scale sets, or worrying about load balancer configuration. Fewer infrastructure management tasks mean smaller DevOps teams and free IT personnel. Functions Platform-as-a-Service integrates easily with other Azure services - it is a prime candidate in any 2025 platform selection matrix. CTOs and VPs of Engineering see adopting Functions as aligned with transformation roadmaps and multi-cloud parity goals. They also view Functions on Azure Container Apps as a logical step in microservice re-platforming and modernization programs, because it enables lift-and-shift of container workloads into a serverless model. Azure Functions now supports container-app co-location and user-defined concurrency - it fits modern reference architectures while controlling spend. The service offers pay-per-execution pricing and a 99.95% SLA on Flex Consumption. Many previous enterprise blockers - network isolation, unpredictable cold starts, scale ceilings - are now mitigated with the Flex Consumption SKU (faster cold starts, user-set concurrency, VNet-integrated "scale-to-zero"). Heads of Innovation pilot Functions for business-process automation and novel services, since MySQL change-data triggers, Durable orchestrations, and browser-based Visual Studio Code enable quick prototyping of automation and new products. Functions enables rapid feature rollout through code-only deployment and auto-scaling, and new OpenAI bindings shorten minimum viable product cycles for artificial intelligence, so Directors of Product see it as a lever for faster time-to-market and differentiation. Functions now supports streaming HTTP, common programming languages like .NET, Node, and Python, and browser-based development through Visual Studio Code, so team onboarding is low-friction. Belitsoft applies deep Azure and .NET development expertise to design serverless solutions that scale with your business. Our Azure Functions developers architect systems that reduce operational overhead, speed up delivery, and integrate seamlessly across your cloud stack. Future of Azure Functions Azure Functions will remain a cornerstone of cloud-native application design. It follows Microsoft's cloud strategy of serverless and event-driven computing and aligns with containers/Kubernetes and AI trends. New features will likely be backward-compatible, protecting investments in serverless architecture. Azure Functions will continue integrating with other Azure services. .NET functions are transitioning to the isolated worker model, decoupling function code from host .NET versions - by 2026, the older in-process model will be phased out. What is Azure Functions Azure Functions is a fully managed serverless service - developers don’t have to deploy or maintain servers. Microsoft handles the underlying servers, applies operating-system and runtime patches, and provides automatic scaling for every Function App. Azure Functions scales out and in automatically in response to incoming events - no autoscale rules are required. On Consumption and Flex Consumption plans you pay only when functions are executing - idle time isn’t billed. The programming model is event-driven, using triggers and bindings to run code when events occur. Function executions are intended to be short-lived (default 5-minute timeout, maximum 10 minutes on the Consumption plan). Microsoft guidance is to keep functions stateless and persist any required state externally - for example with Durable Functions entities.  The App Service platform automatically applies OS and runtime security patches, so Function Apps receive updates without manual effort. Azure Functions includes built-in triggers and bindings for services such as Azure Storage, Event Hubs, and Cosmos DB, eliminating most custom integration code. Azure Functions Core Architecture Components Each Azure Function has exactly one trigger, making it an independent unit of execution. Triggers insulate the function from concrete event sources (HTTP requests, queue messages, blob events, and more), so the function code stays free of hard-wired integrations. Bindings give a declarative way to read from or write to external services, eliminating boiler-plate connection code. Several functions are packaged inside a Function App, which supplies the shared execution context and runtime settings for every function it hosts. Azure Function Apps run on the Azure App Service platform. The platform can scale Function Apps out and in automatically based on workload demand (for example, in Consumption, Flex Consumption, and Premium plans). Azure Functions offers three core hosting plans - Consumption, Premium, and Dedicated (App Service) - each representing a distinct scaling model and resource envelope. Because those plans diverge in limits (CPU/memory, timeout, scale-out rules), they deliver different performance characteristics. Function Apps can use enterprise-grade platform features - including Managed Identity, built-in Application Insights monitoring, and Virtual Network Integration - for security and observability. The runtime natively supports multiple languages (C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, PowerShell, and others), letting each function be written in the team’s preferred stack. Advanced Architecture Patterns Orchestrator functions can call other functions in sequence or in parallel, providing a code-first workflow engine on top of the Azure Functions runtime. Durable Functions is an extension of Azure Functions that enables stateful function orchestration. It lets you build long-running, stateful workflows by chaining functions together. Because Durable Functions keeps state between invocations, architects can create more-sophisticated serverless solutions that avoid the traditional stateless limitation of FaaS. The stateful workflow model is well suited to modeling complex business processes as composable serverless workflows. It adds reliability and fault tolerance. As of 2025, Durable Functions supports high-scale orchestrations, thanks to the new durable-task-scheduler backend that delivers the highest throughput. Durable Functions now offers multiple managed and BYO storage back-ends (Azure Storage, Netherite, MSSQL, and the new durable-task-scheduler), giving architects new options for performance. Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions have been converging. Because Logic Apps Standard is literally hosted inside the Azure Functions v4 runtime, every benefit for Durable Functions (stateful orchestration, high-scale back-ends, resilience, simplified ops) now spans both the code-first and low-code sides of Azure’s workflow stack. Architects can mix Durable Functions and Logic Apps on the same CI/CD pipeline, and debug both locally with one tooling stack. They can put orchestrator functions, activity functions, and Logic App workflows into a single repo and deploy them together. They can also run Durable Functions and Logic Apps together in the same resource group, share a storage account, deploy from the same repo, and wire them up through HTTP or Service Bus (a budget for two plans or an ASE is required). Azure Functions Hosting Models and Scalability Options Azure Functions offers five hosting models - Consumption, Premium, Dedicated, Flex Consumption, and container-based (Azure Container Apps). The Consumption plan is billed strictly “per-execution”, based on per-second resource consumption and number of executions. This plan can scale down to zero when the function app is idle. Microsoft documentation recommends the Consumption plan for irregular or unpredictable workloads. The Premium plan provides always-ready (pre-warmed) instances that eliminate cold starts. It auto-scales on demand while avoiding cold-start latency. In a Dedicated (App Service) plan the Functions host “can run continuously on a prescribed number of instances”, giving fixed compute capacity. The plan is recommended when you need fully predictable billing and manual scaling control. The Flex Consumption plan (GA 2025) lets you choose from multiple fixed instance-memory sizes (currently 2 GB and 4 GB). Hybrid & multi-cloud Function apps can be built and deployed as containers and run natively inside Azure Container Apps, which supplies a fully-managed, KEDA-backed, Kubernetes-based environment. Kubernetes-based hosting The Azure Functions runtime is packaged as a Docker image that “can run anywhere,” letting you replicate serverless capabilities in any Kubernetes cluster. AKS virtual nodes are explicitly supported. KEDA is the built-in scale controller for Functions on Kubernetes, enabling scale-to-zero and event-based scale out. Hybrid & multi-cloud hosting with Azure Arc Function apps (code or container) can be deployed to Arc-connected clusters, giving you the same Functions experience on-premises, at the edge, or in other clouds. Arc lets you attach Kubernetes clusters “running anywhere” and manage & configure them from Azure, unifying governance and operations. Arc supports clusters on other public clouds as well as on-premises data centers, broadening where Functions can run. Consistent runtime everywhere Because the same open-source Azure Functions runtime container is used across Container Apps, AKS/other Kubernetes clusters, and Arc-enabled environments, the execution model, triggers, and bindings remain identical no matter where the workload is placed. Azure Functions Enterprise Integration Capabilities Azure Functions runs code without you provisioning or managing servers. It is event-driven and offers triggers and bindings that connect your code to other Azure or external services. It can be triggered by Azure Event Grid events, by Azure Service Bus queue or topic messages, or invoked directly over HTTP via the HTTP trigger, enabling API-style workloads. Azure Functions is one of the core services in Azure Integration Services, alongside Logic Apps, API Management, Service Bus, and Event Grid. Within that suite, Logic Apps provides high-level workflow orchestration, while Azure Functions provides event-driven, code-based compute for fine-grained tasks. Azure Functions integrates natively with Azure API Management so that HTTP-triggered functions can be exposed as managed REST APIs. API Management includes built-in features for securing APIs with authentication and authorization, such as OAuth 2.0 and JWT validation. It also supports request throttling and rate limiting through the rate-limit policy, and supports formal API versioning, letting you publish multiple versions side-by-side. API Management is designed to securely publish your APIs for internal and external developers. Azure Functions scales automatically - instances are added or removed based on incoming events. Azure Functions Security Infrastructure hardening Azure App Service - the platform that hosts Azure Functions - actively secures and hardens its virtual machines, storage, network connections, web frameworks, and other components.  VM instances and runtime software that run your function apps are regularly updated to address newly discovered vulnerabilities.  Each customer’s app resources are isolated from those of other tenants.  Identity & authentication Azure Functions can authenticate users and callers with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) through the built-in App Service Authentication feature.  The Functions can also be configured to use any standards-compliant OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider.  Network isolation Function apps can integrate with an Azure Virtual Network. Outbound traffic is routed through the VNet, giving the app private access to protected resources.  Private Endpoint support lets function apps on Flex Consumption, Elastic Premium, or Dedicated (App Service) plans expose their service on a private IP inside the VNet, keeping all traffic on the corporate network.  Credential management Managed identities are available for Azure Functions; the platform manages the identity so you don’t need to store secrets or rotate credentials.  Transport-layer protection You can require HTTPS for all public endpoints. Azure documentation recommends redirecting HTTP traffic to HTTPS to ensure SSL/TLS encryption.  App Service (and therefore Azure Functions) supports TLS 1.0 – 1.3, with the default minimum set to TLS 1.2 and an option to configure a stricter minimum version.  Security monitoring Microsoft Defender for Cloud integrates directly with Azure Functions and provides vulnerability assessments and security recommendations from the portal.  Environment separation Deployment slots allow a single function app to run multiple isolated instances (for example dev, test, staging, production), each exposed at its own endpoint and swappable without downtime.  Strict single-tenant / multi-tenant isolation Running Azure Functions inside an App Service Environment (ASE) places them in a fully isolated, dedicated environment with the compute that is not shared with other customers - meeting high-sensitivity or regulatory isolation requirements.  Azure Functions Monitoring Azure Monitor exposes metrics both at the Function-App level and at the individual-function level (for example Function Execution Count and Function Execution Units), enabling fine-grained observability. Built-in observability Native hook-up to Azure Monitor & Application Insights – every new Function App can emit metrics, logs, traces and basic health status without any extra code or agents.  Data-driven architecture decisions Rich telemetry (performance, memory, failures) – Application Insights automatically captures CPU & memory counters, request durations and exception details that architects can query to guide sizing and design changes.  Runtime topology & trace analysis Application Map plus distributed tracing render every function-to-function or dependency call, flagging latency or error hot-spots so that inefficient integrations are easy to see.  Enterprise-wide data export Diagnostic settings let you stream Function telemetry to Log Analytics workspaces or Event Hubs, standardising monitoring across many environments and aiding compliance reporting.  Infrastructure-as-Code & DevOps integration Alert and monitoring rules can be authored in ARM/Bicep/Terraform templates and deployed through CI/CD pipelines, so observability is version-controlled alongside the function code.  Incident management & self-healing Function-specific "Diagnose and solve problems" detectors surface automated diagnostic insights, while Azure Monitor action groups can invoke runbooks, Logic Apps or other Functions to remediate recurring issues with no human intervention.  Hybrid / multi-cloud interoperability OpenTelemetry preview lets a Function App export the very same traces and logs to any OTLP-compatible endpoint as well as (or instead of) Application Insights, giving ops teams a unified view across heterogeneous platforms.  Cost-optimisation insights Fine-grained metrics such as FunctionExecutionCount and FunctionExecutionUnits (GB-seconds = memory × duration) identify high-cost executions or over-provisioned plans and feed charge-back dashboards.  Real-time storytelling tools Application Map and the Live Metrics Stream provide live, clickable visualisations that non-technical stakeholders can grasp instantly, replacing static diagrams during reviews or incident calls.  Kusto log queries across durations, error rates, exceptions and custom metrics to allow architects prove performance, reliability and scalability targets. Azure Functions Performance and Scalability Scaling capacity Azure Functions automatically add or remove host instances according to the volume of trigger events. A single Windows-based Consumption-plan function app can fan out to 200 instances by default (100 on Linux). Quota increases are possible. You can file an Azure support request to raise these instance-count limits. Cold-start behaviour & mitigation Because Consumption apps scale to zero when idle, the first request after idleness incurs extra startup latency (a cold start). Premium plan keeps instances warm. Every Premium (Elastic Premium) plan keeps at least one instance running and supports pre-warmed instances, effectively eliminating cold starts. Scaling models & concurrency control Functions also support target-based scaling, which can add up to four instances per decision cycle instead of the older one-at-a-time approach. Premium plans let you set minimum/maximum instance counts and tune per-instance concurrency limits in host.json. Regional characteristics Quotas are scoped per region. For example, Flex Consumption imposes a 512 GB regional memory quota, and Linux Consumption apps have a 500-instance-per-subscription-per-hour regional cap. Apps can be moved or duplicated across regions. Microsoft supplies guidance for relocating a Function App to another Azure region and for cross-region recovery. Downstream-system protection Rapid scale-out can overwhelm dependencies. Microsoft’s performance guidance warns that Functions can generate throughput faster than back-end services can absorb and recommends applying throttling or other back-pressure techniques. Configuration impact on cost & performance Plan selection and tuning directly affect both. Choice of hosting plan, instance limits and concurrency settings determine a Function App’s cold-start profile, throughput and monthly cost. How Belitsoft Can Help Our serverless developers modernize legacy .NET apps into stateless, scalable Azure Functions and Azure Container Apps. The team builds modular, event-driven services that offload operational grunt work to Azure. You get faster delivery, reduced overhead, and architectures that belong in this decade. Also, we do CI/CD so your devs can stop manually clicking deploy. We ship full-stack teams fluent in .NET, Python, Node.js, and caffeine - plus SignalR developers experienced in integrating live messaging into serverless apps. Whether it's chat, live dashboards, or notifications, we help you deliver instant, event-driven experiences using Azure SignalR Service with Azure Functions. Our teams prototype serverless AI with OpenAI bindings, Durable Functions, and browser-based VS Code so you can push MVPs like you're on a startup deadline. You get your business processes automated so your workflows don’t depend on somebody's manual actions. Belitsoft’s .NET engineers containerize .NET Functions for Kubernetes and deploy across AKS, Container Apps, and Arc. They can scale with KEDA, trace with OpenTelemetry, and keep your architectures portable and governable. Think: event-driven, multi-cloud, DevSecOps dreams - but with fewer migraines. We build secure-by-design Azure Functions with VNet, Private Endpoints, and ASE. Our .NET developers do identity federation, TLS enforcement, and integrate Azure Monitor + Defender. Everything sensitive is locked in Key Vault. Our experts fine-tune hosting plans (Consumption, Premium, Flex) for cost and performance sweet spots and set up full observability pipelines with Azure Monitor, OpenTelemetry, and Logic Apps for auto-remediation. Belitsoft helps you build secure, scalable solutions that meet real-world demands - across industries and use cases. We offer future-ready architecture for your needs - from cloud migration to real-time messaging and AI integration. Consult our experts.

Azure SignalR Use Cases Azure SignalR is routinely chosen as the real-time backbone when organizations modernize legacy apps or design new interactive experiences. It can stream data to connected clients instantly instead of forcing them to poll for updates. Azure SignalR can push messages in milliseconds at scale. Live dashboards and monitoring Company KPIs, financial-market ticks, IoT telemetry and performance metrics can update in real time on browsers or mobile devices, and Microsoft’s Stream Analytics pattern documentation explicitly recommends SignalR for such dynamic dashboards. Real-time chat High-throughput chat rooms, customer-support consoles and collaborative messengers rely on SignalR’s group- and user-targeted messaging APIs. Instant broadcasting and notifications One-to-many fan-out allows live sports scores, news flashes, gaming events or travel alerts to reach every subscriber at once. Collaborative editing Co-authoring documents, shared whiteboards and real-time project boards depend on SignalR to keep all participants in sync. High-frequency data interactions Online games, instant polling/voting and live auctions need millisecond round-trips. Microsoft lists these as canonical "high-frequency data update" scenarios. IoT command-and-control SignalR provides the live metrics feed and two-way control channel that sit between device fleets and user dashboards. The official IoT sustainability blueprint ("Project 15") places SignalR in the visualization layer so operators see sensor data and alerts in real time. Azure SignalR Functionality and Value  Azure SignalR Service is a fully-managed real-time messaging service on Azure, so Microsoft handles hosting, scalability, and load-balancing for you. Because the platform takes care of capacity provisioning, connection security, and other plumbing, engineering teams can concentrate on application features. That same model also scales transparently to millions of concurrent client connections, while hiding the complexity of how those connections are maintained. In practice, the service sits as a logical transport layer (a proxy) between your application servers and end-user clients. It offloads every persistent WebSocket (or fallback) connection, leaving your servers free to execute only hub business logic. With those connections in place, server-side code can push content to clients instantly, so browsers and mobile apps receive updates without resorting to request/response polling. This real-time, bidirectional flow underpins chat, live dashboards, and location tracking scenarios. SignalR Service supports WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, and HTTP Long Polling, and it automatically negotiates the best transport each time a client connects. Azure SignalR Service Modes Relevant for Notifications Azure SignalR Service offers three operational modes - Default, Serverless, and Classic - so architects can match the service’s behavior to the surrounding application design. Default mode keeps the traditional ASP.NET Core SignalR pattern: hub logic runs inside your web servers, while the service proxies traffic between those servers and connected clients. Because the hub code and programming model stay the same, organizations already running self-hosted SignalR can migrate simply by pointing existing hubs at Azure SignalR Service rather than rewriting their notification layer. Serverless mode removes hub servers completely. Azure SignalR Service maintains every client connection itself and integrates directly with Azure Functions bindings, letting event-driven functions publish real-time messages whenever they run. In that serverless configuration, the Upstream Endpoints feature can forward client messages and connection events to pre-configured back-end webhooks, enabling full two-way, interactive notification flows even without a dedicated hub server. Because Azure Functions default to the Consumption hosting plan, this serverless pairing scales out automatically when event volume rises and charges for compute only while the functions execute, keeping baseline costs low and directly tied to usage. Classic mode exists solely for backward compatibility - Microsoft advises choosing Default or Serverless for all new solutions. Azure SignalR Integration with Azure Functions Azure SignalR Service teams naturally with Azure Functions to deliver fully managed, serverless real-time applications, removing the need to run or scale dedicated real-time servers and letting engineers focus on code rather than infrastructure. Azure Functions can listen to many kinds of events - HTTP calls, Event Grid, Event Hubs, Service Bus, Cosmos DB change feeds, Storage queues and blobs, and more - and, through SignalR bindings, broadcast those events to thousands of connected clients, forming an automatic event-driven notification pipeline. Microsoft highlights three frequent patterns that use this pipeline out of the box: live IoT-telemetry dashboards, instant UI updates when Cosmos DB documents change, and in-app notifications for new business events. When SignalR Service is employed with Functions it runs in Serverless mode, and every client first calls an HTTP-triggered negotiate Function that uses the SignalRConnectionInfo input binding to return the connection endpoint URL and access token. Once connected, Functions that use the SignalRTrigger binding can react both to client messages and to connection or disconnection events, while complementary SignalROutput bindings let the Function broadcast messages to all clients, groups, or individual users. Developers can build these serverless real-time back-ends in JavaScript, Python, C#, or Java, because Azure Functions natively supports all of these languages. Azure SignalR Notification-Specific Use Cases Azure SignalR Service delivers the core capability a notification platform needs: servers can broadcast a message to every connected client the instant an event happens, the same mechanism that drives large-audience streams such as breaking-news flashes and real-time push notifications in social networks, games, email apps, or travel-alert services. Because the managed service can shard traffic across multiple instances and regions, it scales seamlessly to millions of simultaneous connections, so reach rather than capacity becomes the only design question. The same real-time channel that serves people also serves devices. SignalR streams live IoT telemetry, sends remote-control commands back to field hardware, and feeds operational dashboards. That lets teams surface company KPIs, financial-market ticks, instant-sales counters, or IoT-health monitors on a single infrastructure layer instead of stitching together separate pipelines. Finally, Azure Functions bindings tie SignalR into upstream business workflows. A function can trigger on an external event - such as a new order arriving in Salesforce - and fan out an in-app notification through SignalR at once, closing the loop between core systems and end-users in real time. Azure SignalR Messaging Capabilities for Notifications Azure SignalR Service supplies targeted, group, and broadcast messaging primitives that let a Platform Engineering Director assemble a real-time notification platform without complex custom routing code. The service can address a message to a single user identifier. Every active connection that belongs to that user-whether it’s a phone, desktop app, or extra browser tab-receives the update automatically, so no extra device-tracking logic is required. For finer-grained routing, SignalR exposes named groups. Connections can be added to or removed from a group at runtime with simple methods such as AddToGroupAsync and RemoveFromGroupAsync, enabling role-, department-, or interest-based targeting. When an announcement must reach everyone, a single call can broadcast to every client connected to a hub.  All of these patterns are available through an HTTP-based data-plane REST API. Endpoints exist to broadcast to a hub, send to a user ID, target a group, or even reach one specific connection, and any code that can issue an HTTP request-regardless of language or platform-can trigger those operations.  Because the REST interface is designed for serverless and decoupled architectures, event-generating microservices can stay independent while relying on SignalR for delivery, keeping the notification layer maintainable and extensible. Azure SignalR Scalability for Notification Systems Azure SignalR Service is architected for demanding, real-time workloads and can be scaled out across multiple service instances to reach millions of simultaneous client connections. Every unit of the service supplies a predictable baseline of 1,000 concurrent connections and includes the first 1 million messages per day at no extra cost, making capacity calculations straightforward. In the Standard tier you may provision up to 100 units for a single instance; with 1,000 connections per unit this yields about 100,000 concurrent connections before another instance is required. For higher-end scenarios, the Premium P2 SKU raises the ceiling to 1,000 units per instance, allowing a single service deployment to accommodate roughly one million concurrent connections. Premium resources offer a fully managed autoscale feature that grows or shrinks unit count automatically in response to connection load, eliminating the need for manual scaling scripts or schedules. The Premium tier also introduces built-in geo-replication and zone-redundant deployment: you can create replicas in multiple Azure regions, clients are directed to the nearest healthy replica for lower latency, and traffic automatically fails over during a regional outage. Azure SignalR Service supports multi-region deployment patterns for sharding, high availability and disaster recovery, so a single real-time solution can deliver consistent performance to users worldwide. Azure SignalR Performance Considerations for Real-Time Notifications Azure SignalR documentation emphasizes that the size of each message is a primary performance factor: large payloads negatively affect messaging performance, while keeping messages under about 1 KB preserves efficiency. When traffic is a broadcast to thousands of clients, message size combines with connection count and send rate to define outbound bandwidth, so oversized broadcasts quickly saturate throughput; the guide therefore recommends minimizing payload size in broadcast scenarios. Outbound bandwidth is calculated as outbound connections × message size / send interval, so smaller messages let the same SignalR tier push many more notifications per second before hitting throttling limits, increasing throughput without extra units. Transport choice also matters: under identical conditions WebSockets deliver the highest performance, Server-Sent Events are slower, and Long Polling is slowest, which is why Azure SignalR selects WebSocket when it is permitted. Microsoft’s Blazor guidance notes that WebSockets give lower latency than Long Polling and are therefore preferred for real-time updates. The same performance guide explains heavy message traffic, large payloads, or the extra routing work required by broadcasts and group messaging can tax CPU, memory, and network resources even when connection counts are within limits, highlighting the need to watch message volume and complexity as carefully as connection scaling. Azure SignalR Security for Notification Systems Azure SignalR Service provides several built-in capabilities that a platform team can depend on when hardening a real-time notification solution. Flexible authentication choices The service accepts access-key connection strings, Microsoft Entra ID application credentials, and Azure-managed identities, so security teams can select the mechanism that best fits existing policy and secret-management practices.  Application-centric client authentication flow Clients first call the application’s /negotiate endpoint. The app issues a redirect containing an access token and the service URL, keeping user identity validation inside the application boundary while SignalR only delivers traffic.  Managed-identity authentication for serverless upstream calls In Serverless mode, an upstream endpoint can be configured with ManagedIdentity. SignalR Service then presents its own Azure identity when invoking backend APIs, removing the need to store or rotate custom secrets.  Private Endpoint network isolation The service can be bound to an Azure Private Endpoint, forcing all traffic onto a virtual network and allowing operators to block the public endpoint entirely for stronger perimeter control. The notification system can meet security requirements for financial notifications, personal health alerts, or confidential business communications and other sensitive enterprise scenarios. Azure SignalR Message Size and Rate Limitations Client-to-server limits Azure imposes no service-side size ceiling on WebSocket traffic coming from clients, but any SignalR hub hosted on an application server starts with a 32 KB maximum per incoming message unless you raise or lower it in hub configuration. When WebSockets are not available and the connection falls back to long-polling or Server-Sent Events, the platform rejects any client message larger than 1 MB. Server-to-client guidance Outbound traffic from the service to clients has no hard limit, but Microsoft recommends staying under 16 MB per message. Application servers again default to 32 KB unless you override the setting (same sources as above). Serverless REST API constraints If you publish notifications through the service’s serverless REST API, the request body must not exceed 1 MB and the combined headers must stay under 16 KB. Billing and message counting For billing, Azure counts every 2 KB block as one message: a payload of 2,001 bytes is metered as two messages, a 4 KB payload as three, and so on. Premium-tier rate limiting The Premium tier adds built-in rate-limiting controls - alongside autoscaling and a higher SLA - to stop any client or publisher from flooding the service. Azure SignalR Pricing and Costs for Notification Systems Azure SignalR Service is sold on a pure consumption basis: you start and stop whenever you like, with no upfront commitment or termination fees, and you are billed only for the hours a unit is running. The service meters traffic very specifically: only outbound messages are chargeable, while every inbound message is free. In addition, any message that exceeds 2 KB is internally split into 2-KB chunks, and the chunks - not the original payload - are what count toward the bill. Capacity is defined at the tier level. In both the Standard and Premium tiers one unit supports up to 1 000 concurrent connections and gives unlimited messaging with the first 1 000 000 messages per unit each day free of charge. For US regions, the two paid tiers of Azure SignalR Service differ only in cost and in the extras that come with the Premium plan - not in the raw connection or message capacity. In Central US/East US, Microsoft lists the service-charge portion at $1.61 per unit per day for Standard and $2.00 per unit per day for Premium. While both tiers share the same capacity, Premium adds fully managed auto-scaling, availability-zone support, geo-replication and a higher SLA (99.95% versus 99.9%). Finally, those daily rates change from region to region. The official pricing page lets you pick any Azure region and instantly see the local figure. Azure SignalR Monitoring and Diagnostics for Notification Systems Azure Monitor is the built-in Azure platform service that collects and aggregates metrics and logs for Azure SignalR Service, giving a single place to watch the service’s health and performance. Azure SignalR emits its telemetry directly into Azure Monitor, so every metric and resource log you configure for the service appears alongside the rest of your Azure estate, ready for alerting, analytics or export. The service has a standard set of platform metrics for a real-time hub: Connection Count (current active client connections) Inbound Traffic (bytes received by the service) Outbound Traffic (bytes sent by the service) Message Count (total messages processed) Server Load (percentage load across allocated units) System Errors and User Errors (ratios of failed operations) All of these metrics are documented in the Azure SignalR monitoring data reference and are available for charting, alert rules, and autoscale logic. Beyond metrics, Azure SignalR exposes three resource-log categories: Connectivity logs, Messaging logs and HTTP request logs. Enabling them through Azure Monitor diagnostic settings adds granular, per-event detail that’s essential for deep troubleshooting of connection issues, message flow or REST calls. Finally, Azure Monitor Workbooks provide an interactive canvas inside the Azure portal where you can mix those metrics, log queries and explanatory text to build tailored dashboards for stakeholders - effectively turning raw telemetry from Azure SignalR into business-oriented, shareable reports. Azure SignalR Client-Side Considerations for Notification Recipients Azure SignalR Service requires every client to plan for disconnections. Microsoft’s guidance explains that connections can drop during routine hub-server maintenance and that applications "should handle reconnection" to keep the experience smooth. Transient network failures are called out as another common reason a connection may close. The mainstream client SDKs make this easy because they already include automatic-reconnect helpers. In the JavaScript library, one call to withAutomaticReconnect() adds an exponential back-off retry loop, while the .NET client offers the same pattern through WithAutomaticReconnect() and exposes Reconnecting / Reconnected events so UX code can react appropriately. Sign-up is equally straightforward: the connection handshake starts with a negotiate request, after which the AutoTransport logic "automatically detects and initializes the appropriate transport based on the features supported on the server and client", choosing WebSockets when possible and transparently falling back to Server-Sent Events or long-polling when necessary. Because those transport details are abstracted away, a single hub can serve a wide device matrix - web and mobile browsers, desktop apps, mobile apps, IoT devices, and even game consoles are explicitly listed among the supported client types. Azure publishes first-party client SDKs for .NET, JavaScript, Java, and Python, so teams can add real-time features to existing codebases without changing their core technology stack. And when an SDK is unavailable or unnecessary, the service exposes a full data-plane REST API. Any language that can issue HTTP requests can broadcast, target individual users or groups, and perform other hub operations over simple HTTP calls. Azure SignalR Availability and Disaster Recovery for Notification Systems Azure SignalR Service offers several built-in features that let a real-time notification platform remain available and recoverable even during severe infrastructure problems: Resilience inside a single region The Premium tier automatically spreads each instance across Azure Availability Zones, so if an entire datacenter fails, the service keeps running without intervention.  Protection from regional outages For region-level faults, you can add replicas of a Premium-tier instance in other Azure regions. Geo-replication keeps configuration and data in sync, and Azure Traffic Manager steers every new client toward the closest healthy replica, then excludes any replica that fails its health checks. This delivers fail-over across regions.  Easier multi-region operations Because geo-replication is baked into the Premium tier, teams no longer need to script custom cross-region connection logic or replication plumbing - the service now "makes multi-region scenarios significantly easier" to run and maintain.  Low-latency global routing Two complementary front-door options help route clients to the optimal entry point: Azure Traffic Manager performs DNS-level health probes and latency routing for every geo-replicated SignalR instance. Azure Front Door natively understands WebSocket/WSS, so it can sit in front of SignalR to give edge acceleration, global load-balancing, and automatic fail-over while preserving long-lived real-time connections. Verified disaster-recovery readiness Microsoft’s Well-Architected Framework stresses that a disaster-recovery plan must include regular, production-level DR drills. Only frequent fail-over tests prove that procedures and recovery-time objectives will hold when a real emergency strikes. How Belitsoft Can Help Belitsoft is the engineering partner for teams building real-time applications on Azure. We build fast, scale right, and think ahead - so your users stay engaged and your systems stay sane. We provide Azure-savvy .NET developers who implement SignalR-powered real-time features. Our teams migrate or build real-time dashboards, alerting systems, or IoT telemetry using Azure SignalR Service - fully managed, scalable, and cost-predictable. Belitsoft specializes in .NET SignalR migrations - keeping your current hub logic while shifting the plumbing to Azure SignalR. You keep your dev workflow, but we swap out the homegrown infrastructure for Azure’s auto-scalable, high-availability backbone. The result - full modernization. We design event-driven, serverless notification systems using Azure SignalR in Serverless Mode + Azure Functions. We’ll wire up your cloud events (CosmosDB, Event Grid, Service Bus, etc.) to instantly trigger push notifications to web and mobile apps. Our Azure-certified engineers configure Managed Identity, Private Endpoints, and custom /negotiate flows to align with your zero-trust security policies. Get the real-time UX without security concerns. We build globally resilient real-time backends using Azure SignalR Premium SKUs, geo-replication, availability zones, and Azure Front Door. Get custom dashboards with Azure Monitor Workbooks for visualizing metrics and alerting. Our SignalR developers set up autoscale and implement full-stack SignalR notification logic using the client SDKs (.NET, JS, Python, Java) or pure REST APIs. Target individual users, dynamic groups, or everyone in one go. We implement auto-reconnect, transport fallback, and UI event handling.

Healthcare Use Cases for Azure Functions Real-time patient streams Functions subscribe to heart-rate, SpO₂ or ECG data that arrives through Azure IoT Hub or Event Hubs. Each message drives the same code path: run anomaly-detection logic, check clinical thresholds, raise an alert in Teams or Epic, then write the event to the patient’s EHR. Standards-first data exchange A second group of Functions exposes or calls FHIR R4 APIs, transforms legacy HL7 v2 into FHIR resources, and routes messages between competing EMR/EHR systems. Tied into Microsoft Fabric’s silver layer, the same functions cleanse, validate and enrich incoming records before storage. AI-powered workflows Another set orchestrates AI/ML steps: pull DICOM images from Blob Storage, preprocess them, invoke an Azure ML model, post-process the inference, push findings back through FHIR and notify clinicians.  The same pattern calls Azure OpenAI Service to summarize encounters, generate codes or draft patient replies - sometimes all three inside a "Hyper-Personalized Healthcare Diagnostics" workflow. Built-in compliance Every function can run under Managed Identities, encrypt data at rest in Blob Storage or Cosmos DB, enforce HTTPS, log to Azure Monitor and Application Insights, store secrets in Key Vault and stay inside a VNet-integrated Premium or Flex plan - meeting the HIPAA safeguards that Microsoft’s BAA covers. From cloud-native platforms to real-time interfaces, our Azure developers, SignalR experts, and .NET engineers build systems that react instantly to user actions, data updates, and operational events and managing everything from secure APIs to responsive front ends. Developer skills that turn those healthcare ideas into running code Core serverless craft Fluency in C#/.NET or Python, every Azure Functions trigger (HTTP, Timer, IoT Hub, Event Hubs, Blob, Queue, Cosmos DB), input/output bindings and Durable Functions is table stakes. Health-data depth Daily work means calling Azure Health Data Services’ FHIR REST API (now with 2025 search and bulk-delete updates), mapping HL7 v2 segments into FHIR R4, and keeping appointment, lab and imaging workflows straight. Streaming and storage know-how Real-time scenarios rely on IoT Hub device management, Event Hubs or Stream Analytics, Cosmos DB for structured PHI and Blob Storage for images - all encrypted and access-controlled. AI integration Teams need hands-on experience with Azure ML pipelines, Azure OpenAI for NLP tasks and Azure AI Vision, plus an eye for ethical-AI and diagnostic accuracy. Security and governance Deep command of Azure AD, RBAC, Key Vault, NSGs, Private Endpoints, VNet integration, end-to-end encryption and immutable auditing is non-negotiable - alongside working knowledge of HIPAA Privacy, Security and Breach-Notification rules. Fintech Use Cases for Azure Functions Real-time fraud defence Functions reading Azure Event Hubs streams from mobile and card channels call Azure Machine Learning or Azure OpenAI models to score every transaction, then block, alert or route it to manual review - all within the milliseconds required by the RTP network and FedNow. High-volume risk calculations VaR, credit-score, Monte Carlo and stress-test jobs fan out across dozens of C# or Python Functions, sometimes wrapping QuantLib in a custom-handler container. Durable Functions orchestrate the long-running workflow, fetching historical prices from Blob Storage and live ticks from Cosmos DB, then persisting results for Basel III/IV reporting. Instant-payment orchestration Durable Functions chain the steps - authorization, capture, settlement, refund - behind ISO 20022 messages that arrive on Service Bus or HTTP. Private-link SQL Database or Cosmos DB ledgers give a tamper-proof trail, while API Management exposes callback endpoints to FedNow, SEPA or RTP. RegTech automation Timer-triggered Functions pull raw data into Data Factory, run AML screening against watchlists, generate DORA metrics and call Azure OpenAI to summarize compliance posture for auditors. Open-Banking APIs HTTP-triggered Functions behind API Management serve UK Open Banking or Berlin Group PSD2 endpoints, enforcing FAPI security with Azure AD (B2C or enterprise), Key Vault-stored secrets and token-based consent flows. They can just as easily consume third-party APIs to build aggregated account views. All code runs inside VNet-integrated Premium plans, uses end-to-end encryption, immutable Azure Monitor logs and Microsoft’s PCI-certified Building Block services - meeting every control in the 12-part PCI standard. Secure FinTech Engineer Platform mastery High-proficiency C#/.NET, Python or Java; every Azure Functions trigger and binding; Durable Functions fan-out/fan-in patterns; Event Hubs ingestion; Stream Analytics queries. Data & storage fluency Cosmos DB for low-latency transaction and fraud features; Azure SQL Database for ACID ledgers; Blob Storage for historical market data; Service Bus for ordered payment flows. ML & GenAI integration Hands-on Azure ML pipelines, model-as-endpoint patterns, and Azure OpenAI prompts that extract regulatory obligations or flag anomalies. API engineering Deep experience with Azure API Management throttling, OAuth 2.0, FAPI profiles and threat protection for customer-data and payment-initiation APIs. Security rigor Non-negotiable command of Azure AD, RBAC, Key Vault, VNets, Private Endpoints, NSGs, tokenization, MFA and immutable audit logging. Regulatory literacy Working knowledge of PCI DSS, SOX, GDPR, CCPA, PSD2, ISO 20022, DORA, AML/CTF and fraud typologies; understanding of VaR, QuantLib, market-structure and SEPA/FedNow/RTP rules. HA/DR architecture Designing across regional pairs, availability zones and multi-write Cosmos DB or SQL Database replicas to meet stringent RTO/RPO targets. Insurance Use Cases for Azure Functions Automated claims (FNOL → settlement) Logic Apps load emails, PDFs or app uploads into Blob Storage, Blob triggers fire Functions that call Azure AI Document Intelligence to classify ACORD forms, pull fields and drop data into Cosmos DB. Next Functions use Azure OpenAI to summarize adjuster notes, run AI fraud checks, update customers and, via Durable Functions, steer the claim through validation, assignment, payment and audit - raising daily capacity by 60%. Dynamic premium calculation HTTP-triggered Functions expose quote APIs, fetch credit scores or weather data, run rating-engine rules or Azure ML risk models, then return a price; timer jobs recalc books in batch. Elastic scaling keeps costs tied to each call. AI-assisted underwriting & policy automation Durable Functions pull application data from CRM, invoke OpenAI or custom ML to judge risk against underwriting rules, grab external datasets, and either route results to an underwriter or auto-issue a policy. Separate orchestrators handle endorsements, renewals and cancellations. Real-time risk & fraud detection Event Grid or IoT streams (telematics, leak sensors) trigger Functions that score risk, flag fraud and push alerts. All pipelines run inside VNet-integrated Premium plans, encrypt at rest/in transit, log to Azure Monitor and meet GDPR, CCPA and ACORD standards. Developer skills behind insurance solutions Core tech High-level C#/.NET, Java or Python; every Functions trigger (Blob, Event Grid, HTTP, Timer, Queue) and binding; Durable Functions patterns. AI integration Training and calling Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI; building Azure ML models for rating and fraud. Data services Hands-on Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Blob Storage, Service Bus; API Management for quote and Open-Banking-style endpoints. Security Daily use of Azure Key Vault, Azure AD, RBAC, VNets, Private Endpoints; logging, audit and encryption to satisfy GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA-style rules. Insurance domain FNOL flow, ACORD formats, underwriting factors, rating logic, telematics, reinsurance basics, risk methodologies and regulatory constraints. Combining these serverless, AI and insurance skills lets engineers automate claims, price premiums on demand and manage policies - all within compliant, pay-per-execution Azure Functions. Logistics Use Cases for Azure Functions Real-time shipment tracking GPS pings and sensor packets land in Azure IoT Hub or Event Hubs.  Each message triggers a Function that recalculates ETAs, checks geofences in Azure Maps, writes the event to Cosmos DB and pushes live updates through Azure SignalR Service and carrier-facing APIs.  A cold-chain sensor reading outside its limit fires the same pipeline plus an alert to drivers, warehouse staff and customers. Instant WMS / TMS / ERP sync A "pick‐and‐pack" event in a warehouse system emits an Event Grid notification. A Function updates central stock in Cosmos DB, notifies the TMS, patches e-commerce inventory and publishes an API callback - all in milliseconds.  One retailer that moved this flow to Functions + Logic Apps cut processing time 60%. IoT-enabled cold-chain integrity Timer or IoT triggers process temperature, humidity and vibration data from reefer units, compare readings to thresholds, log to Azure Monitor, and - on breach - fan-out alerts via Notification Hubs or SendGrid while recording evidence for quality audits. AI-powered route optimization A scheduled Function gathers orders, calls an Azure ML VRP model or third-party optimizer, then a follow-up Function posts the new routes to drivers, the TMS and Service Bus topics. Real-time traffic or breakdown events can retrigger the optimizer. Automated customs & trade docs Blob Storage uploads of commercial invoices trigger Functions that run Azure AI Document Intelligence to extract HS codes and Incoterms, fill digital declarations and push them to customs APIs, closing the loop with status callbacks. All workloads run inside VNet-integrated Premium plans, use Key Vault for secrets, encrypt data at rest/in transit, retry safely and log every action - keeping IoT pipelines, partner APIs and compliance teams happy. Developer skills that make those logistics flows real Serverless core High-level C#/.NET or Python;  fluent in HTTP, Timer, Blob, Queue, Event Grid, IoT Hub and Event Hubs triggers;  expert with bindings and Durable Functions patterns. IoT & streaming Day-to-day use of IoT Hub device management, Azure IoT Edge for edge compute, Event Hubs for high-throughput streams, Stream Analytics for on-the-fly queries and Data Lake for archival. Data & geo services Hands-on Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Maps, SignalR Service and geospatial indexing for fast look-ups. AI & analytics Integrating Azure ML for forecasting and optimization, Azure AI Document Intelligence for paperwork, and calling other optimization or ETA APIs. Integration & security Designing RESTful endpoints with Azure API Management, authenticating partners with Azure AD, sealing secrets in Key Vault, and building retry/error patterns that survive device drop-outs and API outages. Logistics domain depth Understanding WMS/TMS data models, carrier and 3PL APIs, inventory control rules (FIFO/LIFO), cold-chain compliance, VRP algorithms, MQTT/AMQP protocols and KPIs such as transit time, fuel burn and inventory turnover. Engineers who pair these serverless and IoT skills with supply-chain domain understanding turn Azure Functions into the nervous system of fast, transparent and resilient logistics networks. Manufacturing Use Cases for Azure Functions Shop-floor data ingestion & MES/ERP alignment OPC Publisher on Azure IoT Edge discovers OPC UA servers, normalizes tags, and streams them to Azure IoT Hub.  Functions pick up each message, filter, aggregate and land it in Azure Data Explorer for time-series queries, Azure Data Lake for big-data work and Azure SQL for relational joins.  Durable Functions translate new ERP work orders into MES calls, then feed production, consumption and quality metrics back the other way, while also mapping shop-floor signals into Microsoft Fabric’s Manufacturing Data Solutions. Predictive maintenance Sensor flows (vibration, temperature, acoustics) hit IoT Hub. A Function invokes an Azure ML model to estimate Remaining Useful Life or imminent failure, logs the result, opens a CMMS work order and, if needed, tweaks machine settings over OPC UA. AI-driven quality control Image uploads to Blob Storage trigger Functions that run Azure AI Vision or custom models to spot scratches, misalignments or bad assemblies. Alerts and defect data go to Cosmos DB and MES dashboards. Digital-twin synchronization IoT Hub events update Azure Digital Twins properties via Functions. Twin analytics then raise events that trigger other Functions to adjust machine parameters or notify operators through SignalR Service. All pipelines encrypt data, run inside VNet-integrated Premium plans and log to Azure Monitor - meeting OT cybersecurity and traceability needs. Developer skills that turn manufacturing flows into running code Core serverless craft High-level C#/.NET and Python, expert use of IoT Hub, Event Grid, Blob, Queue, Timer triggers and Durable Functions fan-out/fan-in patterns. Industrial IoT mastery Daily work with OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus, IoT Edge deployment, Stream Analytics, Cosmos DB, Data Lake, Data Explorer and Azure Digital Twins; secure API publishing with API Management and tight secret control in Key Vault. AI integration Building and calling Azure ML models for RUL/failure prediction, using Azure AI Vision for visual checks, and wiring results back into MES/SCADA loops. Domain depth Knowledge of ISA-95, B2MML, production scheduling, OEE, SPC, maintenance workflows, defect taxonomies and OT-focused security best practice. Engineers who pair this serverless skill set with deep manufacturing context can stitch IT and OT together - keeping smart factories fast, predictive and resilient. Ecommerce Use Cases for Azure Functions Burst-proof order & payment flows HTTP or Service Bus triggers fire a Function that validates the cart, checks stock in Cosmos DB or SQL, calls Stripe, PayPal or BTCPay Server, handles callbacks, and queues the WMS. A Durable Functions orchestrator tracks every step - retrying, dead-lettering and emailing confirmations - so Black Friday surges need no manual scale-up. Real-time, multi-channel inventory Sales events from Shopify, Magento or an ERP hit Event Grid; Functions update a central Azure MySQL (or Cosmos DB) store, then push deltas back to Amazon Marketplace, physical POS and mobile apps, preventing oversells. AI-powered personalization & marketing A Function triggered by page-view telemetry retrieves context, queries Azure AI Personalizer or a custom Azure ML model, caches recommendations in Azure Cache for Redis and returns them to the front-end. Timer triggers launch abandoned-cart emails through SendGrid and update Mailchimp segments - always respecting GDPR/CCPA consent flags. Headless CMS micro-services Discrete Functions expose REST or GraphQL endpoints (product search via Azure Cognitive Search, cart updates, profile edits), pull content from Strapi or Contentful and publish through Azure API Management. All pipelines run in Key Vault-protected, VNet-integrated Function plans, encrypt data in transit and at rest, and log to Azure Monitor - meeting PCI-DSS and privacy obligations. Developer skills behind ecommerce experiences Language & runtime fluency Node.js for fast I/O APIs, C#/.NET for enterprise logic, Python for data and AI - plus deep know-how in HTTP, Queue, Timer and Event Grid triggers, bindings and Durable Functions patterns. Data & cache mastery Designing globally distributed catalogs in Cosmos DB, transactional stores in SQL/MySQL, hot caches in Redis and search in Cognitive Search. Integration craft Securely wiring payment gateways, WMS/TMS, Shopify/Magento, SendGrid, Mailchimp and carrier APIs through API Management, with secrets in Key Vault and callbacks handled idempotently. AI & experimentation Building ML models in Azure ML, tuning AI Personalizer, storing variant data for A/B tests and analyzing uplift. Security & compliance Implementing OWASP protections, PCI-aware data flows, encrypted config, strong/ eventual-consistency strategies and fine-grained RBAC. Commerce domain depth Full funnel understanding (browse → cart → checkout → fulfillment → returns), SKU and safety-stock logic, payment life-cycles, email-marketing best practice and headless-architecture principles. How Belitsoft Can Help Belitsoft builds modern, event-driven applications on Azure Functions using .NET and related Azure services. Our developers: Architect and implement serverless solutions with Azure Functions using the .NET isolated worker model (recommended beyond 2026). Build APIs, event processors, and background services using C#/.NET that integrate with Azure services like Event Grid, Cosmos DB, IoT Hub, and API Management. Modernize legacy .NET apps by refactoring them into scalable, serverless architectures. Our Azure specialists: Choose and configure the optimal hosting plan (Flex Consumption, Premium, or Kubernetes-based via KEDA). Implement cold-start mitigation strategies (warm-up triggers, dependency reduction, .NET optimization). Optimize cost with batching, efficient scaling, and fine-tuned concurrency. We develop .NET-based Azure Functions that connect with: Azure AI services (OpenAI, Cognitive Services, Azure ML) Event-driven workflows using Logic Apps and Event Grid Secure access via Azure AD, Managed Identities, Key Vault, and Private Endpoints Storage systems like Blob Storage, Cosmos DB, and SQL DB We also build orchestrations with Durable Functions for long-running workflows, multi-step approval processes, and complex stateful systems. Belitsoft provides Azure-based serverless development with full security compliance: Develop .NET Azure Functions that operate in VNet-isolated environments with private endpoints Build HIPAA-/PCI-compliant systems with encrypted data handling, audit logging, and RBAC controls Automate compliance reporting, security monitoring, and credential rotation via Azure Monitor, Sentinel, and Key Vault We enable AI-integration for real-time and batch processing: Embed OpenAI GPT and Azure ML models into Azure Function workflows (.NET or Python) Build Function-based endpoints for model inference, document summarization, fraud prediction, etc. Construct AI-driven event pipelines like trigger model execution from uploaded files or real-time sensor data Our .NET developers deliver complete DevOps integration: Set up CI/CD pipelines for Azure Functions via GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps Instrument .NET Functions with Application Insights, OpenTelemetry, and Log Analytics Implement structured logging, correlation IDs, and custom metrics for troubleshooting and cost tracking Belitsoft brings together deep .NET development know-how and over two decades of experience working across industries. We build maintainable solutions that handle real-time updates, complex workflows, and high-volume customer interactions - so you can focus on what matters most. Contact us to discuss your project.

1. Real-Time Chat and Messaging Real-time chat showcases SignalR perfectly. When someone presses "send" in any chat context (one-to-one, group rooms, support widgets, social inboxes, chatbots, or game lobbies), other users see messages instantly. This low-latency, bi-directional channel also enables typing indicators and read receipts. SignalR hubs let developers broadcast to all clients in a room or target specific users with sub-second latency. Applications include customer portal chat widgets, gaming communication, social networking threads, and enterprise collaboration tools like Slack or Teams. Belitsoft brings deep .NET development and real-time system expertise to projects where SignalR connects users, data, and devices. You get reliable delivery, secure integration, and smooth performance at scale. What Capabilities To Expect from Developers Delivering those experiences demands full-stack fluency. On the server, a developer needs ASP.NET Core (or classic ASP.NET) and the SignalR library, defines Hub classes, implements methods that broadcast or target messages, and juggles concepts like connection groups and user-specific channels. Because thousands of sockets stay open concurrently, asynchronous, event-driven programming is the norm. On the client, the same developer (or a front-end teammate) wires the JavaScript/TypeScript SignalR SDK into the browser UI, or uses the .NET, Kotlin or Swift libraries for desktop and mobile apps. Incoming events must update a chat view, update timestamps, scroll the conversation, and animate presence badges - all of which call for solid UI/UX skills. SignalR deliberately hides the transport details - handing you WebSockets when available, and falling back to Server-Sent Events or long-polling when they are not - but an engineer still benefits from understanding the fallbacks for debugging unusual network environments. A robust chat stack typically couples SignalR with a modern front-end framework such as React or Angular, a client-side store to cache message history, and server-side persistence so those messages survive page refreshes. When traffic grows, Azure SignalR Service can help. Challenges surface at scale. Presence ("Alice is online", "Bob is typing…") depends on handling connection and disconnection events correctly and, in a clustered deployment, often requires a distributed cache - or Azure SignalR’s native presence API - to stay consistent. Security is non-negotiable: chats run over HTTPS/WSS, and every hub call must respect the app’s authentication and authorization rules. Delivery itself is "best effort": SignalR does not guarantee ordering or that every packet arrives, so critical messages may include timestamps or sequence IDs that let the client re-sort or detect gaps. Finally, ultra-high concurrency pushes teams toward techniques such as sharding users into groups, trimming payload size, and offloading long-running work. 2. Push Notifications and Alerts Real-time, event-based notifications make applications feel alive. A social network badge flashing the instant a friend comments, a marketplace warning you that a rival bidder has raised the stakes, or a travel app letting you know your gate just moved.  SignalR, Microsoft’s real-time messaging library, is purpose-built for this kind of experience: a server can push a message to a specific user or group the moment an event fires. Across industries, the pattern looks similar. Social networks broadcast likes, comments, and presence changes. Online auctions blast out "out-bid" alerts, e-commerce sites surface discount offers the second a shopper pauses on a product page, and enterprise dashboards raise system alarms when a server goes down.  What Capabilities To Expect from Developers Under the hood, each notification begins with a back-end trigger - a database write, a business-logic rule, or a message on an event bus such as Azure Service Bus or RabbitMQ. That trigger calls a SignalR hub, which in turn decides whether to broadcast broadly or route a message to an individual identity. Because SignalR associates every WebSocket connection with an authenticated user ID, it can deliver updates across all of that user’s open tabs and devices at once. Designing those triggers and wiring them to the hub is a back-end-centric task: developers must understand the domain logic, embrace pub/sub patterns, and, in larger systems, stitch SignalR into an event-driven architecture. They also need to think about scale-out. In a self-hosted cluster, a Redis backplane ensures that every instance sees the same messages. In Azure, a fully managed SignalR Service offloads that work and can even bind directly to Azure Functions and Event Grid. Each framework - React, Angular, Blazor - has its own patterns for subscribing to SignalR events and updating the state (refreshing a Redux store, showing a toast, lighting a bell icon). The UI must cope gracefully with asynchronous bursts: batch low-value updates, throttle "typing" signals so they fire only on state changes, debounce presence pings to avoid chatty traffic. Reliability and performance round out the checklist. SignalR does not queue messages for offline users, so developers often persist alerts in a database for display at next login or fall back to email for mission-critical notices. High-frequency feeds may demand thousands of broadcasts per second -  grouping connections intelligently and sending the leanest payload possible keeps bandwidth and server CPU in check. 3. Live Data Broadcasts and Streaming Events On a match-tracker page, every viewer sees the score, the new goal, and the yellow card pop up the very second they happen - no manual refresh required. The same underlying push mechanism delivers the scrolling caption feed that keeps an online conference accessible, or the breaking-news ticker that marches across a portal’s masthead. Financial dashboards rely on the identical pattern: stock-price quotes arrive every few seconds and are reflected in real time for thousands of traders, exactly as dozens of tutorials and case studies demonstrate. The broadcast model equally powers live polling and televised talent shows: as the votes flow in, each new total flashes onto every phone or browser instantly. Auction platforms depend on it too, pushing the latest highest bid and updated countdown to every participant so nobody is a step behind. Retailers borrow the same trick for flash sales, broadcasting the dwindling inventory count ("100 left… 50 left… sold out") to heighten urgency. Transit authorities deploy it on departure boards and journey-planner apps, sending schedule changes the moment a train is delayed. In short, any "one-to-many" scenario - live event updates, sports scores, stock tickers, news flashes, polling results, auction bids, inventory counts or timetable changes - is a fit for SignalR-style broadcasting. Developer capabilities required to deliver the broadcast experience To build and run those experiences at scale, developers must master two complementary arenas: efficient fan-out on the server and smooth, resilient consumption on the client. Server-side fan-out and data ingestion. The first craft is knowing SignalR’s all-client and group-broadcast APIs inside-out. For a single universal channel - say, one match or one stock symbol - blasting to every connection is fine. With many channels (hundreds of stock symbols, dozens of concurrent matches) the developer must create and maintain logical groups, adding or removing clients dynamically so that only the interested parties receive each update. Those groups need to scale, whether handled for you by Azure SignalR Service or coordinated across multiple self-hosted nodes via a Redis or Service Bus backplane. Equally important is wiring external feeds - a market-data socket, a sports-data API, a background process - to the hub, throttling if ticks come too fast and respecting each domain’s tolerance for latency. Scalability and global reach. Big events can attract hundreds of thousands or even millions of concurrent clients, far beyond a single server’s capacity. Developers therefore design for horizontal scale from the outset: provisioning Azure SignalR to shoulder the fan-out, or else standing up their own fleet of hubs stitched together with a backplane. When audiences are worldwide, they architect multi-region deployments so that fans in Warsaw or Singapore get the same update with minimal extra latency, and they solve the harder puzzle of keeping data consistent across regions - work that usually calls for senior-level or architectural expertise. Client-side rendering and performance engineering. Rapid-fire data is useless if it chokes the browser, so developers practice surgical DOM updates, mutate only the piece of the page that changed, and feed streaming chart libraries such as D3 or Chart.js that are optimized for real-time flows. Real-world projects like the CareCycle Navigator healthcare dashboard illustrate the point: vitals streamed through SignalR, visualized via D3, kept clinicians informed without interface lag. Reliability, ordering, and integrity. In auctions or sports feeds, the order of events is non-negotiable. A misplaced update can misprice a bid or mis-report a goal. Thus implementers enforce atomic updates to the authoritative store and broadcast only after the state is final. If several servers or data sources are involved, they introduce sequence tags or other safeguards to spot and correct out-of-order packets. Sectors such as finance overlay stricter rules - guaranteed delivery, immutability, audit trails - so developers log every message for compliance. Domain-specific integrations and orchestration. Different industries add their own wrinkles. Newsrooms fold in live speech-to-text, translation or captioning services and let SignalR deliver the multilingual subtitles. Video-streaming sites pair SignalR with dedicated media protocols: the video bits travel over HLS or DASH, while SignalR synchronizes chapter markers, subtitles or real-time reactions. The upshot is that developers must be versatile system integrators, comfortable blending SignalR with third-party APIs, cognitive services, media pipelines and scalable infrastructure. 4. Dashboards and Real-Time Monitoring Dashboards are purpose-built web or desktop views that aggregate and display data in real time, usually pulling simultaneously from databases, APIs, message queues, or sensor networks, so users always have an up-to-the-minute picture of the systems they care about. When the same idea is applied specifically to monitoring - whether of business processes, IT estates, or IoT deployments - the application tracks changing metrics or statuses the instant they change. SignalR is the de-facto transport for this style of UI because it can push fresh data points or status changes straight to every connected client, giving graphs, counters, and alerts a tangible "live" feel instead of waiting for a page refresh. In business intelligence, for example, a real-time dashboard might stream sales figures, website traffic, or operational KPIs so the moment a Black-Friday customer checks out, the sales‐count ticker advances before the analyst’s eyes. SignalR is what lets the bar chart lengthen and the numeric counters roll continuously as transactions arrive. In IT operations, administrators wire SignalR into server- or application-monitoring consoles so that incoming log lines, CPU-utilization graphs, or error alerts appear in real time. Microsoft’s own documentation explicitly lists "company dashboards, financial-market data, and instant sales updates" as canonical SignalR scenarios, all of which revolve around watching key data streams the instant they change. On a trading desk, portfolio values or risk metrics must tick in synchrony with every market movement. SignalR keeps the prices and VaR calculations flowing to traders without perceptible delay. Manufacturing and logistics teams rely on the same pattern: a factory board displaying machine states or throughput numbers, or a logistics control panel highlighting delayed shipments and vehicle positions the instant the telemetry turns red or drops out. In healthcare, CareCycle Navigator illustrates the concept vividly. It aggregates many patients’ vital signs - heart-rate, blood-pressure, oxygen saturation - from bedside or wearable IoT devices, streams them into a common clinical view, and pops visual or audible alerts the moment any threshold is breached. City authorities assemble smart-city dashboards that watch traffic sensors, energy-grid loads, or security-camera heartbeats. A change at any sensor is reflected in seconds because SignalR forwards the event to every operator console. What developers must do to deliver those dashboards To build such experiences, developers first wire the backend. They connect every relevant data source - relational stores, queues, IoT hubs, REST feeds, or bespoke sensor gateways - and keep pulling or receiving updates continuously via background services that run asynchronous or multithreaded code so polling never blocks the server. The moment fresh data arrives, that service forwards just the necessary deltas to the SignalR hub, which propagates them to the browser or desktop clients. Handling bursts - say a thousand stock-price ticks per second - means writing code that filters or batches judiciously so the pipe remains fluid. Because not every viewer cares about every metric, the hub groups clients by role, tenant, or personal preference. A finance analyst might subscribe only to the "P&L-dashboard" group, while an ops engineer joins "Server-CPU-alerts". Designing the grouping and routing logic so each user receives their slice - no more, no less - is a core SignalR skill. On the front end, the same developer (or a teammate) stitches together dynamic charts, tables, gauges, and alert widgets. Libraries such as D3, Chart.js, or ng2-charts all provide APIs to append a data point or update a gauge in place. When a SignalR message lands, the code calls those incremental-update methods so the visual animates rather than re-renders. If a metric crosses a critical line, the component might flash or play a sound, logic the developer maps from domain-expert specifications. During heavy traffic, the UI thread remains smooth only when updates are queued or coalesced into bursts. Real-time feels wonderful until a site becomes popular -  then scalability matters. Developers therefore learn to scale out with Azure SignalR Service or equivalent, and, when the raw event firehose is too hot, they aggregate - for instance, rolling one second’s sensor readings into a single averaged update - to trade a sliver of resolution for a large gain in throughput. Because monitoring often protects revenue or safety, the dashboard cannot miss alerts. SignalR’s newer clients auto-reconnect, but teams still test dropped-Wi-Fi or server-restart scenarios, refreshing the UI or replaying a buffered log, so no message falls through the cracks. Skipping an intermediate value may be fine for a simple running total, yet it is unacceptable for a security-audit log, so some systems expose an API that lets returning clients query missed entries. Security follows naturally: the code must reject unauthorized connections, enforce role-based access, and make sure the hub never leaks one tenant’s data to another. Internal sites often bind to Azure AD; public APIs lean on keys, JWTs, or custom tokens - but in every case, the hub checks claims before it adds the connection to a group. The work does not stop at launch. Teams instrument their own SignalR layer - messages per second, connection counts, memory consumption - and tune .NET or service-unit allocation so the platform stays within safe headroom. Azure SignalR tiers impose connection and message quotas, so capacity planning is part of the job. 5. IoT and Connected Device Control Although industrial systems still lean on purpose-built protocols such as MQTT or AMQP for the wire-level link to sensors, SignalR repeatedly shows up one layer higher, where humans need an instantly updating view or an immediate "push-button" control.  Picture a smart factory floor: temperature probes, spindle-speed counters and fault codes flow into an IoT Hub. The hub triggers a function that fans those readings out through SignalR to an engineer’s browser.  The pattern re-appears in smart-building dashboards that show which lights burn late, what the thermostat registers, or whether a security camera has gone offline. One flick of a toggle in the UI and a SignalR message races to the device’s listening hub, flipping the actual relay in the wall. Microsoft itself advertises the pairing as "real-time IoT metrics" plus "remote control," neatly summing up both streams and actions. What developers must master to deliver those experiences To make that immediacy a reality, developers straddle two very different worlds: embedded devices on one side, cloud-scale web apps on the other. Their first task is wiring devices in. When hardware is IP-capable and roomy enough to host a .NET, Java or JavaScript client, it can connect straight to a SignalR hub (imagine a Raspberry Pi waiting for commands). More often, though, sensors push into a heavy-duty ingestion tier - Azure IoT Hub is the canonical choice - after which an Azure Function, pre-wired with SignalR bindings, rebroadcasts the data to every listening browser. Teams outside Azure can achieve the same flow with a custom bridge: a REST endpoint ingests device posts, application code massages the payload and SignalR sends it onward. Either route obliges fluency in both embedded SDKs (timers, buffers, power budgets) and cloud/server APIs. Security threads through every concern. The hub must sit behind TLS. Only authenticated, authorized identities may invoke methods that poke industrial machinery. Devices themselves should present access tokens when they join. Industrial reality adds another twist: existing plants speak OPC UA, BACnet, Modbus or a half-century-old field bus. Turning those dialects into dashboard-friendly events means writing protocol translators that feed SignalR, so the broader a developer’s protocol literacy - and the faster they can learn new ones - the smoother the rollout. 6. Real-Time Location Tracking and Maps A distinct subset of real-time applications centers on showing moving dots on a map. Across transportation, delivery services, ridesharing and general asset-tracking, organizations want to watch cars, vans, ships, parcels or people slide smoothly across a screen the instant they move. SignalR is a popular choice for that stream-of-coordinates because it can push fresh data to every connected browser the moment a GPS fix arrives. In logistics and fleet-management dashboards, each truck or container ship is already reporting latitude and longitude every few seconds. SignalR relays those points straight to the dispatcher’s web console, so icons drift across the map almost as fast as the vehicle itself and the operator can reroute or reprioritise on the spot. Ridesharing apps such as Uber or Lyft give passengers a similar experience. The native mobile apps rely on platform push technologies, but browser-based control rooms - or any component that lives on the web - can use SignalR to show the driver inching closer in real time. Food-delivery brands (Uber Eats, Deliveroo and friends) apply the same pattern, so your takeaway appears to crawl along the city grid toward your door. Public-transport operators do it too: a live bus or train map refreshes continuously, and even the digital arrival board updates itself the moment a delay is flagged. Traditional call-center taxi-dispatch software likewise keeps every cab’s position glowing live on screen. Inside warehouses, tiny BLE or UWB tags attached to forklifts and pallets send indoor-positioning beacons that feed the same "moving marker" visualization. On campuses or at large events the very same mechanism can - subject to strict privacy controls - let security teams watch staff or tagged equipment move around a venue in real time. Across all these situations, SignalR’s job is simple yet vital: shuttle a never-ending stream of coordinate updates from whichever device captured them to whichever client needs to draw them, with the lowest possible latency. What it takes to build and run those experiences Delivering the visual magic above starts with collecting the geo-streams. Phones or dedicated trackers typically ping latitude and longitude every few seconds, so the backend must expose an HTTP, MQTT or direct SignalR endpoint to receive them. Sometimes the mobile app itself keeps a two-way SignalR connection open, sending its location upward while listening for commands downward; either way, the developer has to tag each connection with a vehicle or parcel ID and fan messages out to the right audience. Once the data is in hand, the front-end mapping layer takes over. Whether you prefer Google Maps, Leaflet, Mapbox or a bespoke indoor canvas, each incoming coordinate triggers an API call that nudges the relevant marker. If updates come only every few seconds, interpolation or easing keeps the motion silky. Updating a hundred markers at that cadence is trivial, but at a thousand or more you will reach for clustering or aggregation so the browser stays smooth. The code must also add or remove markers as vehicles sign in or drop off, and honor any user filter by ignoring irrelevant updates or, more efficiently, by subscribing only to the groups that matter. Tuning frequency and volume is a daily balancing act. Ten messages per second waste bandwidth and exceed GPS accuracy; one per minute feels stale. Most teams settle on two- to five-second intervals, suppress identical reports when the asset is stationary and let the server throttle any device that chats too much, always privileging "latest position wins" so no one watches an outdated blip. Because many customers or dispatchers share one infrastructure, grouping and permissions are critical. A parcel-tracking page should never leak another customer’s courier, so each web connection joins exactly the group that matches its parcel or vehicle ID, and the hub publishes location updates only to that group - classic SignalR group semantics doubling as an access-control list. Real-world location workflows rarely stop at dots-on-a-map. Developers often bolt on geospatial logic: compare the current position with a timetable to declare a bus late, compute distance from destination, or raise a geofence alarm when a forklift strays outside its bay. Those calculations, powered by spatial libraries or external services, feed right back into SignalR so alerts appear to operators the instant the rule is breached. The ecosystem is unapologetically cross-platform. A complete solution spans mobile code that transmits, backend hubs that route, and web UIs that render - all stitched together by an architect who keeps the protocols, IDs and security models consistent. At a small scale, a single hub suffices, but a city-wide taxi fleet demands scalability planning. Azure SignalR or an equivalent hosted tier can absorb the load, data-privacy rules tighten, and developers may fan connections across multiple hubs or treat groups like topics to keep traffic and permissions sane. Beyond a certain threshold, a specialist telemetry system could outperform SignalR, yet for most mid-sized fleets a well-designed SignalR stack copes comfortably. How Belitsoft Can Help For SaaS & Collaboration Platforms Belitsoft provides teams that deliver Slack-style collaboration with enterprise-grade architecture - built for performance, UX, and scale. Develop chat, notifications, shared whiteboards, and live editing features using SignalR Implement presence, typing indicators, and device-sync across browsers, desktops, and mobile Architect hubs that support sub-second latency and seamless group routing Integrate SignalR with React, Angular, Blazor, or custom front ends For E-commerce & Customer Platforms Belitsoft brings front-end and backend teams who make "refresh-free" feel natural - and who keep customer engagement and conversions real-time. Build live cart updates, flash-sale countdowns, and real-time offer banners Add SignalR-powered support widgets with chat, typing, and file transfer Stream price or stock changes instantly across tabs and devices Use Azure SignalR Service for cloud-scale message delivery For Enterprise Dashboards & Monitoring Tools Belitsoft’s developers know how to build high-volume dashboards with blazing-fast updates, smart filtering, and stress-tested performance. Build dashboards for KPIs, financials, IT monitoring, or health stats Implement metric updates, status changes, and alert animations Integrate data from sensors, APIs, or message queues For Productivity & Collaboration Apps Belitsoft engineers "enable" co-editing merge logic, diff batching, and rollback resilience. Implement shared document editing, whiteboards, boards, and polling tools Stream remote cursor movements, locks, and live deltas in milliseconds Integrate collaboration UIs into desktop, web, or mobile platforms For Gaming & Interactive Entertainment Belitsoft developers understand the crossover of game logic, WebSocket latency, and UX - delivering smooth multiplayer infrastructure even at high concurrency. Build lobby chat, matchmaking, and real-time leaderboard updates Stream state to dashboards and spectators For IoT & Smart Device Interfaces Belitsoft helps companies connect smart factories, connected clinics, and remote assets into dashboards. Integrate IoT feeds into web dashboards Implement control interfaces for sensors, relays, and smart appliances Handle fallbacks and acknowledgements for device commands Visualize live maps, metrics, and anomalies For Logistics & Tracking Applications Belitsoft engineers deliver mapping, streaming, and access control - so you can show every moving asset as it happens. Build GPS tracking views for fleets, packages, or personnel Push map marker updates Ensure access control and group filtering per user or role For live dashboards, connected devices, or collaborative platforms, Belitsoft integrates SignalR into end-to-end architectures. Our experience with .NET, Azure, and modern front-end frameworks helps companies deliver responsive real-time solutions that stay secure, stable, and easy to evolve - no matter your industry. Contact to discuss your needs.

How Belitsoft Can Help LMS Consulting. Using our elearning software development and implementation experience for startups, SMEs, and large enterprises, we can recommend the deployment mode and the LMS that suits your company best. LMS Migration. We can help your business to move from cloud to on-premise and vice versa. Custom LMS Development. Thanks to 15+ years of building and maintaining eLearning applications and a proven experience in making LMS’ from scratch, we can provide you with a unique and powerful system for improved learning outcomes. Ready-made LMS. We have a boxed LMS solution that could be just what you are looking for. Available in both cloud and on-premise versions. LMS Customization. Our team can tailor any open-source LMS to your requirements, whatever they may be. LXP platform consulting, development and implementation. Learning Experience Platforms offer several features that are often not available in traditional Learning Management Systems to create a more personalized learning experience. We usually implement skill mapping to identify the skills present within an organization and mapping them to available learning resources; automatically customized courses based on individual learner preferences, skills, and career goals based on AI-powered recommendations, microlearning and gamification. We also provide career development tools such as career path visualization based on the skills and courses completed. GET A FREE QUOTE What Is a Self-Hosted LMS The LMS part of the term is pretty clear - Learning Management System. The “self-hosted” is a bit trickier: it means that the company using the LMS also owns and controls the hosting server, whether on-premise or elsewhere. Who Needs a Self-Hosted LMS Now that these systems have become more of a niche option than a universal one, here’s who can benefit from them the most: Security-conscious companies. In the case of organizations that store very sensitive information in their system, even the best cloud-based LMS’ become a liability. Large enterprises. Big companies likely have the infrastructure and specialists that can support self-hosted systems without trouble. They can also benefit from the better long-term value of such LMS’. Unique courses. If your company needs a custom workflow or a very special curriculum, cloud-based systems aren’t flexible enough to support them. Self-hosted LMS vs Cloud LMS While self-hosted systems are losing in popularity to their cloud-based counterparts, they have a number of advantages over the cloud-based ones. More Customization Flexibility Custom functions are an Achilles’ heel of the cloud-based systems. And it gets especially noticeable when the vendor is making updates. Any update has a chance to disrupt the custom features and even third-party integrations a user has. Feel free to check the reviews of the popular LMS’ to see what we are talking about. This is why the vendors of the cloud-based systems limit the users’ ability to make changes - it’s a one-size-fits-all approach. On-premise systems don’t have this problem. Your company would be an exclusive user of your version of the LMS and you’ll be free to modify it as you see fit. Better Data Security Possibilities Any LMS vendor worth their salt will take steps to protect their product against malicious actors. While cloud-based systems are generally pretty safe, self-hosted ones have more inherent potential in this regard. This ties in with the previous point on the list. For example, you need your system to be HIPAA-compliant. Implementing many of these security measures wouldn’t be viable for a common cloud-based system, but there is nothing stopping you from using them on your own server. Another part of the issue is that people using the same system share the same vulnerabilities. No software is unbreakable, and if a hacker locates an exploit that lets them access sensitive information, all the people on the shared platform become threatened. If your system has been modified, the vulnerability in question might not exist. Moreover, you can host your LMS on a server without access to the Internet whatsoever, negating the risk almost entirely. Better Integrations If you need to connect a self-hosted LMS to other software (HRM, CRM, ERP, etc.) you’ll have a much easier time. The shared cloud-based systems typically have integration options, but they are more limited and less reliable. More Independence from Vendor If the LMS vendor goes out of business, people using the shared cloud-based platform can kiss their system goodbye. The on-premise systems, however, have a number of ways to ensure that they remain working no matter what happens to the company that developed them. Examples include giving customers perpetual licenses for free, making the system open source, or distributing the on-premise version of the LMS as open source by default. Disadvantages of Self-Hosted LMS This is where the self-hosted LMS’ are inferior to cloud-based systems. Higher Upfront Costs Hosting an LMS yourself requires a substantial initial investment. This includes the payment for the perpetual license, as well as (possibly) domain name, hosting services, hardware, IT-team salaries, and more. The long-term total cost of ownership is lower, but the initial payment is much higher. More Responsibility Hosting and managing your LMS yourself takes much more effort than with a shared cloud-based system. You have to take care of maintenance, security, uptime, and many other things that are otherwise the provider’s responsibility. Updating Issues Working with a cloud-based LMS allows you to get all the updates almost immediately. Yes, sometimes they can disrupt the work, but other times they bring useful new features and improvements. In the case of a self-hosted LMS you’ll have to remain without updates entirely, pay for them, or have your IT-team work on upgrading the system. Popular Self-Hosted LMS’ JoomlaLMS JoomlaLMS is a powerful, yet easy to use software that is based on the popular Joomla! Content Management System. It is available in both cloud-based and desktop versions and has a mobile app. Core features: Built-in authoring tool Videoconferencing support Mobile learning Learner portal SCORM compliance Here’s what the users praise it for: Cost-efficiency. “As a teacher, I appreciate when a platform I use is very user-friendly and cost-effective. I like that JoomlaLMS satisfies my professional needs. I am also very satisfied with the support team because they helped me a lot since my IT skills are not outstanding.” — Ljiljana G. Convenience. “Super friendly and modern interface receives frequent updates including security. It has several free and paid templates to make the look professional. As well as extensions to add features to the website or blog.” — Carlos R. Flexibility. “In every instance that we had, where customization was not possible, we were able to find a satisfactory workaround. For example, if students need to sit a final, external exam that is not part of the online training , the results can be manually added via JoomlaLMS. No other moderately-priced programme that we looked at was able to do this. This flexibility makes JoomlaLMS far more powerful than is seen at first glance.” — Dile S. But there are some disadvantages too: Complicated maintenance. “It is difficult to show someone else how to maintain the website, as so many features are organized in strange fashions. Also, you have to click many times just to get to one item, and often has very clunky ways to finish up a project. Also, after a while, many links were irreparably broken. I also got multiple emails from Joomla - sometimes every few minutes. That seemed to be a flaw” — Mary W. Open edX Open edX is a free open-source LMS created by MIT and Harvard University. It is mostly focused on delivering MOOCs. Open EdX. Source Core features: In-built authoring tool SCORM support Gamification This is what the users like about it: Convenient course management. “It is easy to break long courses into manageable chunks and to check a learner's understanding at each step. Usually this would require me to fly to meet my new sales agents, but now I can simply sign them up for the course and track their progress.” — Marianne L. Powerful features. “Awesome features... I use less dynamic LMS platforms and this one is one of the most engaging. It feels like a real classroom; students can engage in real time as long as they follow syllabi. If you fall behind you can reset your dates and your grades are rolled over from the previous date. I've used the live video conferencing feature which adds to real-life interaction. The discussion boards and forums are aesthetically pleasing. You can download the app and the features are equally good. You can audit the course.” — Carol H. Helpful community. “Openedx has a wonderful community behind it - we have always got help from them if we ever get stuck. The product has evolved over the years and with a fantastic mobile app available - it has made learning and reaching the users far easier” — Million L.. And this is what they don’t: Access control issues. “We had to find a work-around for being able to hide internal (Sales agent) courses from the general public. It would be nice to have an internal course option available.” — Marianne L. Complicated to install. “The deployment can be a bit cumbersome since it's a fairly large project. Luckily you are able to get help from the community or reach out to vendors.” — Luiz A. Weak learner interaction tools. “The tools for learner interaction (i.e. the forums) are fairly weak. They need more modern features, and especially more support for team-based moderation.” — Reviewer verified by LinkedIn Moodle Moodle is a free LMS that is available in both cloud-based and on-premise versions. It is highly customizable and has a vibrant community around it.  Moodle. Source Core features: Built-in authoring tool Gamification Videoconferencing support Mobile learning Learner portal SCORM compliance Moodle advantages: Good documentation. "There is a good amount of helping documentation with Moodle you can find almost anything on their documentation. I am happy to say that our students are still using it daily." Good design. “The design and layout is simple and the best part about it is that it makes learning fun and interactive for the students.” Low cost. “Moodle is open source, and therefore inexpensive and low risk to test. If a company is considering eLearning, this should be your first option as a pilot. No pre-planning is as good as actual experience.” Moodle disadvantages: Complicated implementation. “This is difficult to set up, particularly if you want to make use of the assessments. You need to define your users and your strategy upfront or it can become a muddle with different departments adding "courses". Buggy updates. “Whenever updates for Moodle are released (six-monthly) there are always some problems with existing content, especially with non-standard features that have been designed exclusively for a course or institution. Sometimes they are not immediately evident and can cause issues during the teaching period.” Hard for newbies. “Moodle is not intuitive to the novice. It took some time for me to learn how to use its many features and implement them well. I have been doing this for at least 8 years, but I am still learning more about the system and its capabilities.” Chamilo Chamilo is an open-source LMS from Spain, which has been on the eLearning market since 2010. Chamilo. Source Core features: Built-in authoring tool Videoconferencing support Mobile learning SCORM compliance These are the Chamilo’s advantages: Flexibility. “Stable, mature, solid software. You can use it as a fully working LMS or just as a framework to create your own solution. Also the possibility for gamification or selling courses/sessions makes it even more attractive for running your own online academy. And with the skill wheel, talent management got easier.” Good UI and UX. “Chamilo is really easy to use as a student. As a teacher it is intuitive but very broad. You can create simple basic courses (text courses with multiple choice quizzes) or really advanced courses (conditional questions, wiki, assignments, group collaboration, forums, ...) It offers a huge set of features to organize students in classes, work with sessions (date based set of courses) or single courses. It fully pulls the card of open source and is thus invested in reaching out to open source solutions like Big Blue Button or OpenMeetings for webinar features.” Free. “Chamillo is a free learning management system that has can be used for medium sized businesses. Installation is easy as it comes in Softacoulous bundle available in any standard hosting.” And these are its disadvantages: Questionable architecture. “At the team, we are not 100% happy with the architecture behind Chamilo. It's not easy to make modifications since the html code is distributed in hard to follow chunks all over the place. The fact that it's using an unsafe language like PHP doesn't make it easier.” SCORM compatibility issues. “Although it supports SCORM content , some of the SCORM files I tried on Chamilo didn't work. That was the reason I had to move away . However , its internal authoring tool developed content functioned very smoothly.” iSpring Learn This venerable system has been on the market since 2001 and has both cloud-based and self-hosted versions.  iSpring Learn. Source Core features: Built-in authoring tool Gamification Videoconferencing support Mobile learning Learner portal SCORM compliance This is what the users like about iSpring: Ease of use. “iSpring Learn is an affordable and easy-to-use solution. You don't need to be an expert to use it and you can set the solution in just a couple of hours! Thus, you can quickly offer e-Learning courses to your customers. The users can also access to courses on their mobile devices with the app, which is a really great feature. iSpring Suite is perfectly integrated with iSpring Learn, so you can directly publish your presentations to the LMS. That means time saving.” Offline mode. “iSpring learn have the capability to track all my assignments and their completion statistics. the courses could be used offline. also the courses could adapt to any screen size. its a great platform for learning and enhancing one's skills.” Cost-efficiency. “Reasonable/fair billing No limit for on-line content I found this amazing when I first started using iSpring Learn in 2010. There seems to be no limit to how much content can be uploaded to iSpring Learn servers. I currently have about 10gb in the system. Other learning management systems I have used charged by the megabyte combined with the number of students. Great up-time track record. It goes without saying that students must have consistent access to the eLearning system.” And this is what they don’t: Slow to improve. “New functionality has only been added piecemeal, presumably where a client has paid for a new feature to match their specific requirements. The new functions then aren't applied across the whole system (since the client didn't pay for that work). The result is a "swiss cheese" of a product, with huge holes. For example, the API doesn't allow you to retrieve attributes that were added in new functionality. The API itself allows you to set and retrieve (limited parts of) individual records, but doesn't let you get access to reports programmatically. SSO is all-or-nothing - you have to have the same SSO for all Organizations, which sucks if you're using the same course material in-house as well as externally. And SSO doesn't support the latest standards. Discussion forums are similarly only open to all and can't be limited to Organizations. Presumably both SSO and Discussions were added before some client paid for multiple Organizations to be added.” Limited features. “eCommerce is limited. iSpring's definition of a "Course" is just about any content item (presentation, reading material, test, assignment, etc.). My "courses" typically have 10 modules and as many as 28 lessons. Each lesson contains about 5 content items. For eCommerce, it would be better to provide access to a full course (by my definition), instead of a single content item.” Weak reporting. “A report writer has been identified as one feature which would greatly assist the administrator in creating reports on the fly according to requirements he may have to get a view of course progress. The available online reports are good but self-generated reports would be a great feature.”