Build resilient AI agents and workflows on Azure, now with pay-as-you-go pricing
Today, we're excited to announce that the Durable Task Scheduler Consumption SKU has reached General Availability. Developers can now run durable workflows and agents on Azure with pay-per-use pricing, no storage to manage, no capacity to plan, and no idle costs. Just create a scheduler, connect your app, and start orchestrating. Whether you're coordinating AI agent workflows, processing event-driven pipelines, or running background jobs, the Consumption SKU is ready to go.
GET STARTED WITH THE DURABLE TASK SCHEDULER CONSUMPTION SKU
Since launching the Consumption SKU in public preview last November, we've seen incredible adoption and have incorporated feedback from developers around the world to ensure the GA release is truly production ready.
“The Durable Task Scheduler has become a foundational piece of what we call ‘workflows’. It gives us the reliability guarantees we need for processing financial documents and sensitive workflows, while keeping the programming model straightforward. The combination of durable execution, external event correlation, deterministic idempotency, and the local emulator experience has made it a natural fit for our event-driven architecture. We have been delighted with the consumption SKUs cost model for our lower environments.”– Emily Lewis, CarMax
What is the Durable Task Scheduler?
If you're new to the Durable Task Scheduler, we recommend checking out our previous blog posts for a detailed background:
- Announcing Limited Early Access of the Durable Task Scheduler
- Announcing Workflow in Azure Container Apps with the Durable Task Scheduler
- Announcing Dedicated SKU GA & Consumption SKU Public Preview
In brief, the Durable Task Scheduler is a fully managed orchestration backend for durable execution on Azure, meaning your workflows and agent sessions can reliably resume and run to completion, even through process failures, restarts, and scaling events. Whether you’re running workflows or orchestrating durable agents, it handles task scheduling, state persistence, fault tolerance, and built-in monitoring, freeing developers from the operational overhead of managing their own execution engines and storage backends.
The Durable Task Scheduler works across Azure compute environments:
- Azure Functions: Using the Durable Functions extension across all Function App SKUs, including Flex Consumption.
- Azure Container Apps: Using the Durable Functions or Durable Task SDKs with built-in workflow support and auto-scaling.
- Any compute: Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure App Service, or any environment where you can run the Durable Task SDKs (.NET, Python, Java, JavaScript).
Why choose the Consumption SKU?
With the Consumption SKU you’re charged only for actions dispatched, with no minimum commitments or idle costs. There’s no capacity to size or throughput to reserve. Create a scheduler, connect your app, and you’re running.
The Consumption SKU is a natural fit for workloads with unpredictable or bursty usage patterns:
- AI agent orchestration: Multi-step agent workflows that call LLMs, retrieve data, and take actions. Users trigger these on demand, so volume is spiky and pay-per-use avoids idle costs between bursts.
- Event-driven pipelines: Processing events from queues, webhooks, or streams with reliable orchestration and automatic checkpointing, where volumes spike and dip unpredictably.
- API-triggered workflows: User signups, form submissions, payment flows, and other request-driven processing where volume varies throughout the day.
- Distributed transactions: Retries and compensation logic across microservices with durable sagas that survive failures and restarts.
What's included in the Consumption SKU at GA
The Consumption SKU has been hardened based on feedback and real-world usage during the public preview. Here's what's included at GA:
Performance
- Up to 500 actions per second: Sufficient throughput for a wide range of workloads, with the option to move to the Dedicated SKU for higher-scale scenarios.
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Up to 30 days of data retention: View and manage orchestration history, debug failures, and audit execution data for up to 30 days.
Built-in monitoring dashboard
Filter orchestrations by status, drill into execution history, view visual Gantt and sequence charts, and manage orchestrations (pause, resume, terminate, or raise events), all from the dashboard, secured with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
Identity-based security
The Consumption SKU uses Entra ID for authentication and RBAC for authorization. No SAS tokens or access keys to manage, just assign the appropriate role and connect.
Get started with the Durable Task Scheduler today
The Consumption SKU is available now Generally Available. Provision a scheduler in the Azure portal, connect your app, and start orchestrating. You only pay for what you use.
We'd love to hear your feedback. Reach out to us by filing an issue on our GitHub repository
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