Azure Functions is a serverless compute platform — write code, Azure handles infrastructure. Triggered by HTTP, timer, Service Bus, Event Grid, Blob Storage, and more. Flex Consumption plan: scales to zero, pay only for execution time + instances. Durable Functions: stateful workflows orchestrated as code (orchestrators, activities, entity patterns). Cold start latency (0.5-3s) is the trade-off for scale-to-zero.
Input/output bindings eliminate boilerplate.
Regular Functions are stateless — each invocation is independent. Durable Functions maintain state across multiple activities that execute asynchronously over minutes or hours. No external database or queue needed to coordinate multi-step workflows.
Flex Consumption plan (2024): pre-warm instances start in 0.5s vs 3s for Consumption. Pay-per-execution with deployment in your VNet. More predictable latency, private networking, same scale-to-zero economics.
Trigger, input, and output bindings handle all the Azure service connection boilerplate. Blob Storage, Queue, Cosmos DB, Service Bus — one-line declarations in function.json or decorators. Focus on business logic.
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