How to Build Reliable Long-Running Workflows with Azure Durable Functions
How to Build Reliable Long-Running Workflows with Azure Durable Functions Imagine an order-processing API that must validate an order, reserve inventory, and send a confirmation email. Each step is simple on its own, but the complete workflow gets harder when a downstream service is temporarily unavailable, when a step must wait minutes or hours for an external event, or when the process must survive a host restart without losing progress. A normal Azure Function is ideal for one short, stateless operation. Azure Durable Functions is the extension you reach for when you need reliable state and coordination across multiple steps — without building your own orchestration database, retry logic, or polling mechanism. What Are Azure Durable Functions? Durable Functions is an extension of Azure Functions for writing stateful workflows in regular C#. The Durable Task runtime persists the workflow’s progress and reconstructs its in-memory state after restarts, so a workflow...