Azure Functions Flex Consumption is now generally available

We are excited to announce that Azure Functions Flex Consumption is now generally available. This hosting plan provides the highest performance for Azure Functions with concurrency-based scaling for both HTTP and non-HTTP triggers, scale from zero to 1000 instances, and no cold start with the Always Ready feature. Flex Consumption also allows you to enjoy seamless integration with your virtual network at no extra cost, ensuring secure and private communication, with no considerable impact to your app’s scale out performance.

Graph showing a Flex Consumption app’s instances going from 0 to close to 1000 in less than 60 seconds

Learn more about How to achieve high HTTP scale with Azure Functions Flex Consumption, the engineering innovation behind it, and project Legion, the platform behind Flex Consumption.

In addition to the fast scaling based on per-instance concurrency, you can choose between 2048MB and 4096MB instance sizes. As the function app receives requests it will automatically scale from zero to as many instances of that instance size as needed based on per instance concurrency, and back to zero for cost efficiency when there’s no more requests to process. You can also take advantage of the built-in integration with Azure Load Testing and the Performance Optimizer to optimize your HTTP functions for performance and cost.

Flex Consumption is now generally available for .NET 8 on the isolated worker model, Java 11, Java 17, Node 20, PowerShell 7.4, Python 3.10, and Python 3.11 in Australia East, East Asia, East US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Sweden Central, UK South, and West US 2, and in preview in East US 2, South Central US, and West US 3. By December 9th 2024, .NET 9 will also generally available in Australia East, East Asia, East US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Sweden Central, and UK South.

Besides the currently supported DevOps and dev tools like VS Code, Java tooling, Azure Pipeline tasks, and GitHub Actions, you can now use the latest Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 update or newer to create and publish to Flex Consumption apps.    

Print screen of Flex Consumption support in Visual Studio 2022

The Flex Consumption plan offers competitive pricing with flexible options to fit your needs, with GA pricing taking effect on December 1, 2024. For detailed pricing information, please refer to the pricing page.

Customer adoption and scenarios

We have been working with several internal and external customers during the public preview period, with hundreds of external customers actively using Flex Consumption.

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	At Yggdrasil, we immediately started adopting Flex Consumption functions when they went into public preview, as they offer the combination of cost-efficiency, scalability, and security features we need to run our company. We already have 100 Flex Consumption functions running in production, and expect to move at least another 50 functions, now that the product has reached GA. We migrated to Flex from consumption to have VNet integration and private endpoints. – Andreas Strandfelt, Partner & Senior Cloud Specialist at Yggdrasil Commodities ApS
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	What really matters to us is that the app scales up and down based on demand. Azure Functions Flex Consumption is very appealing to us because of how it dynamically scales based on the number of messages that are queued up in Azure Event Hubs – Stephan Miehe, GitHub Senior Director. Public case study
“
Microsoft AI	We had a need to process a large queue, representing a significant volume of data with inconsistent availability. Azure Functions Flex Consumption dramatically simplified the code footprint needed to perform this embarrassingly parallel task and helped us complete it in a much shorter timeframe that we had expected. – Craig Presti, Office of the CTO, Microsoft AI project

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Going Forward

In the upcoming months we look forward to rolling out even more features to Flex Consumption, including:

• Availability zones: Enabling availability zones will be possible for new and existing Flex Consumption apps
• 512 MB instance size: We will introduce a new, smaller instance size for more granular control
• Enhanced tooling support: PowerShell modules and Terraform AzureRM support
• New language versions: Support for the latest language versions like Node 22, Python 3.12, and Java 21
• Expanded regional availability: The number of regions will continue to expand in early 2025 with UAE North, Centra US, West US 3, South Central US, East US 2, West US, Canada Central, France Central, and Norway East coming first
• Metrics support: Full Azure Monitor metrics support for Flex Consumption apps
• Deployment improvements: Zero-downtime deployment to ensure no disruption to running executions
• More triggers: Kafka and SQL triggers
• Closing features: Addressing the limitations identified in Considerations. 

  Please let us know which ones are most important to you!

Get Started!

Explore our reference samples, quickstarts, and comprehensive documentation to get started with the Azure Functions Flex Consumption hosting plan today!