Getting started with Durable Functions

Azure Durable Functions are an extension of Azure Functions, and therefore, has additional benefits over a standard function, such as state management, retry activities and being able to easily cancel workflows that are still in progress. However, for someone that was not used to working with them, there were a few scenarios that I was caught out by.

In this post, I aim to cover the important basics about Durable Functions and how I personally got used to working with them and started to write efficient Durable Functions. This includes covering how state management works, as well as how to deal with long running functions and large data sets.

Orchestration Client

An Orchestration Client binding allows you to write functions that can interact with Orchestrator functions. The Orchestration Client is used to start the orchestrator function, and can also be used to check the status of the function, as well as terminate them.

The below example shows how an Orchestration Client is used to start the Orchestrator function.