Why use Azure Functions for ML inference ?

Thanks for your comment NeliMacMullen. Yes for VM-lite scenarios - Premium Functions is a great option where the run time limit is increased to 1 hour - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-premium-plan#longer-run-duration - The thing that you get here in addition to a standard VM is of-course all the triggering based on events and event based scale up and scale down (scale down to 1 in this case) to handle any burst cases and then go back to 1 instance when you are done. Further you get the local debug experience etc. with VSCode. And later if you ever want to deploy the same Function app to the Consumption app (10 min. limit, cheaper) and even to Kubernetes it is very easy to do so.