Discover Azure Durable Functions

Key Takeaways

About Jonah

Jonah Anderson from Forefront Consulting is a Software Developer, Microsoft MVP for Azure, Certified Azure Developer, Microsoft Certified Trainer, and IT Consultant in Sweden. She is the founder and a community leader at Azure User Group Sweden. Jonah is also the author of the book Learning Microsoft Azure

Azure Functions in Real-time business

Jonah claims that Azure functions are very useful for an event-driven architecture. For example, consider an event-driven application, that needs to talk to API, or if you need to have event driven use cases that requires to listen to an event from an IoT Hub or an event in the Service Bus queue. In such real time event driven use cases, serverless Azure Functions or durable functions is an ideal choice.

Not just Functions, also Durable Functions…

Not just our functions, but there is also an extension of Azure Function called Durable Functions. Azure Functions is function as a service, in which developers focus on the code, data input and output binding. Durable Functions is an extension of Azure Functions that allow us to write stateful workflows.

Followed by the explanation Jonah shares about the different types of durable functions and its patterns. There are three types of durable functions,

Client Functions
Orchestrator Functions
Activity Functions
Durable Entity Functions

There are six known patterns, function chaining pattern, async HTTP API functions, Fan-out/fan-in pattern, human-interaction pattern, monitor pattern, and aggregator pattern.

When to choose the durable function over a logic app?

Azure Functions are more of coding and writing workflows in the code. While Azure Logic App, it is more on the UI, but both can go hand in hand as well. Jonah being a developer herself likes to write code where she did more of upgrading workflows with Durable Functions. However, Jonah finds potential also with Azure Logic App when it comes to local solutions and integration with other services like Office 365 and other SaaS services. Both Logic App and Azure Functions integrates well depending on the use case that you are trying to solve and depending on the available human skill set available, the choice can be done.

The programming languages that Azure Functions support

Azure functions or Durable Functions support several languages to code. Currently it supports C#, PowerShell, Python, JavaScript, and other languages as well. They are also working on having Azure Functions available in other programming languages like GO or RUST language and a lot of frameworks are supported. After the Ignite, they also announced the Azure Container ops, which are for serverless containers.

Azure Functions! Should we go for a consumption plan or App Service plan?

The common option for serverless solutions is the consumption plan. In consumption plan issues that can occur is the problem with the cold start, which is common. But if the need is to have a dedicated service, then premium plan can be a choice. Based on Jonah’s experience she says that some projects in production works well in consumption service because they save a lot of money.

The Author Jonah…

Jonah is currently writing a book which is a one-year project. She is writing a book about Azure. The book is for beginners of Azure and the intermediate level as well, in which the readers will be able to learn the basics of Azure. It also covers chapters about the different services or categories in networking, security, and even Jonah’s experience with cloud migration.The reason for Jonah to write the book was her Cloud Migration journey. The scenario was to move a legacy application to the cloud where that migration journey failed because of lack of cloud knowledge. This is the reason why Jonah wanted to write the book so that she can create a cloud education for others.

“It’s not just about moving stuff to the cloud. There’s more to that. So yeah, I hope this book will help and it will be released soon” – Jonah Anderson.