This is the first part in a series of articles.

Durable Functions are built on top of top of the basic Azure Functions platform and provide the ability to define how multiple individual functions can be set up to work together.

You can accomplish a lot with just the basic Azure Functions so the durable extensions are not necessarily required to implement your solutions, however if you find yourself needing to make multiple functions work together in some kind of workflow then durable functions may be able to simply things and as a bonus allow you to document in code how the functions interact.

Using Multiple Functions

Just as you would keep classes and methods functionally cohesive (i.e. do one/small number related things) so should your Azure Functions be “specialized”. There are a number of good reasons for breaking down a problem into multiple individual functions such as:

• Auto-scaling of functions rather than auto-scaling one massive “god” function
• Maintainability: individual functions doing one thing are easier to understand/bug fix/test
• Reusability/composeability: smaller units (functions) of logic could be reused in multiple workflows
• Time-outs: if an individual function execution exceeds a timeout it will be stopped before finishing

Even if you are not going to use durable functions the above points still make sense.

Common Patterns That Durable Functions Can Help With

There are a number of common logical/architectural/workflow patterns that durable functions can help to orchestrate such as:

• Chained Functions: the output of one function triggers the next function in the chain (aka functions pipeline)
• Fan out, fan in: Split data into “chunks” (fanning out), process chunks in parallel,  aggregate results (fan-in)
• Asynchronous HTTP APIs: Co-ordinate HTTP request with other services, client polls endpoint to check if work complete
• Monitors: recurring process to perform clean-up, monitor (call) APIs to wait for completion, etc.
• Human interaction: wait for human to make a decision at some part during the workflow

Implementing the preceding patterns without the use of durable functions may prove difficult, complex, or error prone due to the need to manually manage checkpoints (where are we in the process?) in addition to  other implementation details.

What Do Durable Functions Provide?

When using durable functions, there are a number of implementation details that are taken care of for you such as:

• Maintains execution position of the workflow
• When to execute next function
• Replaying actions
• Workflow monitoring/diagnostics
• Workflow state storage
• Scalability

Durable functions  also provide the ability to specify the workflow (“orchestration”) in code rather than using a visual flowchart style tool for example.

In the next part of this series we’ll see how to create a basic durable orchestration in C#.

If you want to fill in the gaps in your C# knowledge be sure to check out my C# Tips and Traps training course from Pluralsight – get started with a free trial.

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