What is the main purpose of Azure Functions Durable Functions?

Azure Functions Durable Functions is primarily designed to enable the creation of stateful workflows in a serverless environment. This is particularly useful for scenarios where you need to manage complex orchestration of activities that require the tracking of progress and state over time.

With Durable Functions, developers can create workflows that can pause and resume between function calls, enabling the seamless handling of tasks that might take a long time to complete or involve waiting for external events. This capability allows for activities that are inherently stateful, such as long-running business processes, approvals, and chaining tasks together while maintaining their context throughout the execution.

This framework also simplifies the programming model for managing state and orchestrating workflows, thereby reducing complexity and increasing productivity for developers. The ability to define these stateful workflows makes it possible to build robust applications that can scale according to demand and operate efficiently in the cloud.