Compare: Azure Functions vs Azure Batch

Question

Can we use Azure Functions along with Azure Batch? Please Advise.

I am working on a POC to decide which one to use for our background processes.

Answer 1

I too was in similar dilemma till I tried both of them for my use case.

The major difference between the two is that Azure Function has a hard timeout limit of I guess 10 minutes which you can not exceed. What I mean is that if your script/execution runs beyond 10 minutes then Azure function will kill it automatically.

Whereas Azure batch is essentially a configuration of pools or VMs in which you can run long running jobs where you are not bothered about the time of its execution. Essentially they are old VMs (low costs too). Difference between batch and Azure VMs is that Azure VMs have high speed VMs but in batch you can configure the periodic jobs where in Azure VMs you need to code in such a way that it executed like a periodic job

And yes it is possible to use Functions with Azure batch. You can configure your script as HTTP trigger in Function which you can call (get/post) through Azure Batch VMs.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

May be we should expand this topic to Azure services for Batch processing in general. I did come across an article from Microsoft that goes through these options in general (which includes Web Jobs, and Kubernetes options).

But, frankly, even after reading the article; the confusion remains. For example, Azure Batches can be scheduled; but not sure if they can be triggered based on other Azure services like how Azure web jobs handles it. I get a feeling that Azure Batch is pitched where you need high + parallel computing at low costs. Because, none of the other options directly allow you to low-priority and low-cost compute instances. Correct me please!

#AzureBatch #AzureWebJobs #AzureAKS #AzureFunctions