Announcing Workflow in Azure Container Apps with the Durable task scheduler – Now in Preview!

We are thrilled to announce the durable workflow capabilities in Azure Container Apps with the Durable task scheduler (preview). This new feature brings powerful workflow capabilities to Azure Container Apps, enabling developers to build and manage complex, durable workflows as code with ease.

What is Workflow and the Durable task scheduler?

If you’ve missed the initial announcement of the durable task scheduler, please see these existing blog posts:

• https://aka.ms/dts-early-access
• https://aka.ms/dts-public-preview

In summary, the Durable task scheduler is a fully managed backend for durable execution. Durable Execution is a fault-tolerant approach to running code, designed to handle failures gracefully through automatic retries and state persistence. It is built on three core principles:

• Incremental Execution: Each operation is executed independently and in order.
• State Persistence: The output of each step is saved to ensure progress is not lost.
• Fault Tolerance: If a step fails, the operation is retried from the last successful step, skipping previously completed steps.

Durable Execution is especially advantageous for scenarios that require stateful chaining of operations, commonly known as workflow or orchestrations. A few scenarios include:

• Transactions
• Order Processing Workflows
• Infrastructure Management
• Deployment Pipelines
• AI / ML and Data Engineering
• Data Processing Pipelines and ETL
• Intelligent Applications with AI Agent Orchestrations

Workflow in Azure Container Apps

The Durable task scheduler features a managed workflow engine responsible for scheduling workflow execution and persisting workflow state. Additionally, it includes an out-of-the-box monitoring and management dashboard, making it easy for developers to debug and manage workflows on demand.

Durable Task Programming Model

Durable Task Scheduler Workflow Monitoring and Management Dashboard

You can author your workflows as code using the Durable Task SDKs, which currently support .NET, Python, and Java. Support for JavaScript and Go is on the roadmap. The Durable Task SDKs are lightweight, unopinionated, and designed to be portable across compute environments.

To get started with the Durable Task Scheduler on Azure Container Apps:

• Import the Durable Task SDK for your preferred language and author your workflows.
• Provision a Durable Task Scheduler resource in your Azure environment.
• Connect your application to the Durable Task Scheduler backend for workflow orchestration and state persistence.

Note: The Durable task scheduler is also available with Durable Functions that are deployed to Azure Container Apps. For more information on choosing the right workflow framework, please see this document:

Key Benefits of using the Durable task scheduler for workflow task execution:

• Azure Managed: The Durable Task Scheduler provides dedicated resources that are fully managed by Azure. Orchestration and entity state management are completely built in.
• High Performance: The Durable Task Scheduler offers superior performance, efficiently managing high orchestration and task scheduling.
• Scalability: Manage sudden bursts of events with the ability to auto-scale your container app replicas using a built-in scaler, ensuring reliable, and efficient processing of orchestration work-items across your container app workers.
• Simplified Monitoring: With the built-in monitoring dashboard, developers can easily track the progress of their workflow, view activity durations, and manage workflows instances.
• Ease of Use: Author workflows as code using the Durable Task SDKs or Azure Durable Functions and connect directly to the Durable Task Scheduler backend.

• Security Best Practices: Uses identity-based authentication with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for enterprise-grade authorization, eliminating the need for SAS tokens or access keys.

• Versioning: Version workflows to support iterative changes without compatibility issues – enabling zero-downtime deployments. (Currently available in the .NET SDK; support for other SDKs is coming soon).
• Scheduling: Trigger workflows on a recurring interval, ideal for time-based automation. (Currently available in the .NET SDK; support for other SDKs is coming soon).
• Disaster Recovery: Ensure workflows can recover gracefully from failures from disasters, such as outages. (Coming soon).

Get Started Today

For more on the workflow capabilities using the Durable Task Scheduler in Azure Container Apps, see the official documentation here. To get started with workflow in Azure Container Apps, visit the quickstarts here.

For more Azure Container Apps updates at Build 2025, refer to this blog: https://aka.ms/aca/whats-new-blog-build-2025