Managing complex, long-running processes is often a challenge in software development. Frameworks such as the Azure Durable Task Framework or Azure Durable Functions can help to orchestrate complex processes. Until now, however, they have only offered limited options for monitoring and analyzing processes. With the introduction of the Azure Durable Task Scheduler, significant progress has been made that considerably simplifies the development and monitoring of such workflows.

Challenges in the orchestration of workflows

The orchestration of workflows is a central component of modern software development, especially when it comes to complex, long-running processes. Although many frameworks offer solutions, there are often practical hurdles that lead developers to pursue alternative approaches.

Complexity of process control

Controlling workflows quickly becomes a challenge as complexity increases. Processes must connect different services and systems and often take dependencies or conditional logic into account. Durable Functions promised to cope with this complexity, but in practice we often came up against limits, especially when it came to the traceability and control of processes.

To get around this problem, I relied on choreography patterns in almost all projects. Instead of using a central orchestration component, we had the individual services communicate with each other via event mechanisms such as Azure Service Bus or Event Grid. This led to greater modularity and decoupling of the services, making the processes more flexible. However, this approach also had disadvantages: without central control, we had to develop additional tools and logic to maintain an overview.

Error handling and recovery

Errors are one of the unavoidable challenges in workflow orchestration. Network problems, service failures or unforeseen error sources can bring any process to a standstill. Durable Functions promised a theoretical remedy here too, but in practice it was often unclear how a workflow could be cleanly restored without losing data.

To overcome this challenge, we also relied on dead letter queues. Faulty messages or events were stored in special queues, analyzed and reprocessed if necessary. Although this approach generally worked well, it required careful planning and high-maintenance implementations. It was also difficult to make the entire process traceable.

Monitoring and debugging

An often underestimated problem in workflow orchestration is monitoring. The ability to analyse running processes and quickly identify errors is crucial for maintenance and optimization. With Durable Functions, you often felt “blind” in this respect. There was a lack of integrated dashboards or tools to gain a transparent insight into the status and processes of the workflows.

The challenges of orchestrating workflows are many and varied, and there is rarely a perfect solution. While Durable Functions addressed many of these problems in theory, in practice questions of transparency, control and monitoring often remained unanswered. Alternative approaches such as choreography patterns offered more insight, but led to increased development & infrastructure effort. The new Azure Durable Task Scheduler promises to eliminate many of these weaknesses - a real game changer for long-running workflows.

Azure Durable Task Schedulers

With the introduction of the Azure Durable Task Scheduler, Microsoft has taken a major step to fundamentally improve the way you work with Azure Durable Functions and complex workflows. This new, fully Azure-managed backend provides developers with a robust platform to orchestrate long-running processes without having to deal with the previous limitations.

The Azure Durable Task Scheduler is specifically designed to solve the challenges of state management, error handling and scaling for Durable Functions.

With the Durable Task Scheduler, error handling is significantly simplified. The system can automatically reset processes to the last saved state so that workflows can continue to run seamlessly. This is particularly valuable for long-running processes where consistency and reliability are important. The robust recovery mechanisms reduce the effort that previously had to go into implementing custom solutions.

By moving the storage and process logic to a specially developed backend, workflows benefit from significant performance improvements. The Task Scheduler automatically scales to cope with high loads while ensuring consistently high availability. Developers can rely on their processes remaining stable and performant regardless of the system load.

One of the biggest new features of the Durable Task Scheduler is the Task Hub Dashboard, an integrated monitoring tool that revolutionizes workflow monitoring and analysis. This dashboard offers developers the opportunity to

• Gain live insights into running workflows, including all intermediate steps and statuses.
• Quickly identify errors and take targeted measures to rectify them.
• Analyze process metrics to identify bottlenecks or inefficient steps.

Where previously manual workarounds and external tools were often necessary, the dashboard provides a central point of contact for debugging and monitoring - directly integrated and easy to use.

The Azure Durable Task Scheduler brings many improvements that are directly tailored to the needs of developers. It combines the advantages of a managed backend with a modern monitoring solution and a scalable architecture. For anyone who has struggled with the limitations of Durable Functions or had to develop their own solutions such as event-based choreographies, the Durable Task Scheduler offers real added value.

Task Hub Dashboard

With the Task Hub Dashboard, Microsoft has introduced a long-awaited functionality that finally gives developers the transparency they need about their workflows. While Durable Functions have always been powerful, debugging, monitoring and tracking processes has always been a challenge. The Task Hub Dashboard solves this problem with an intuitive user interface that provides insight into all running, completed or faulty workflows.

The dashboard serves as a central point of contact for everything to do with managing and analyzing Durable Functions. It provides developers with comprehensive information about:

• The current status of all workflows, including running, completed and failed instances.
• Detailed logs and events documenting every step of the process.
• Lead times, bottlenecks and other important metrics for optimizing workflows.

The dashboard makes work much easier, especially when troubleshooting. Instead of having to fight your way through confusing logs or external tools, it provides all relevant information at a glance.

The timeline view of the Task Hub Dashboard is a real highlight and sets new standards in the traceability of workflows. It displays the entire process history of an individual workflow instance as a timeline. This visualization offers several advantages:

• Chronological overview: Every step, every event and every action is displayed in the order in which they were actually executed. This makes it easy for developers to follow the course of the process.
• Duration analysis: In addition to the sequence, the timeline also shows the duration of each step, which helps to identify bottlenecks or inefficient parts of the workflow.
• Troubleshooting made easy: Erroneous steps are highlighted directly so that developers can quickly identify where and why something went wrong.

Another function of the Task Hub Dashboard is the sequence diagram overview. While the timeline offers a chronological perspective, the sequence diagram visualizes the logical sequence of interactions within the workflow. This view is similar to classic UML sequence diagrams and offers numerous advantages:

• Transparency over interactions: Developers can see how the different parts of the workflow - including external services or sub-processes - interact with each other.
• Visualization of dependencies: Complex relationships between different process steps are clearly displayed, which helps with planning and optimization.
• Structure-level debugging: If a step fails, the diagram shows not only the error, but also the affected downstream steps that depend on it.

When developing the dashboard, Microsoft took care to create a user-friendly interface that remains clear even for complex workflows.

Conclusion

With the Azure Durable Task Scheduler and the associated Task Hub Dashboard, Microsoft has delivered a crucial update for working with Durable Functions. These innovations directly address the weaknesses that have often led developers to avoid Durable Functions in the past or to resort to complicated workarounds.

With these innovations, Azure Durable Functions is taking a big leap forward. The Durable Task Scheduler is an indispensable tool, especially for projects with complex, long-running processes or high transparency and scalability requirements.

Would you like to try out the new features straight away? You can apply for early access here: https://aka.ms/dts-ignite-signup

Resources

• https://www.florian-lenz.io/blog/mehr-transparenz-und-kontrolle-fur-durable-functions-das-bringt-der-azure-durable-task-scheduler
• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/appsonazureblog/announcing-limited-early-access-of-the-durable-task-scheduler-for-azure-durable-/4286526
• https://youtu.be/aJnZwU40K6A