Azure Functions Agents Runtime¶
Public preview. The features described here are available for preview use and may change before general availability.
A markdown-first programming model for building AI agents on Azure Functions, powered by the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF).
- Build agents with markdown — write instructions, configure triggers, and bind tools in
.agent.mdfiles - Run on any Azure Functions trigger — trigger agents on timer, queue, blob, HTTP, Event Hub, Service Bus, Cosmos DB, and more
- Connect to 1,400+ services — use connector-backed MCP servers to let agents act through Office 365, Teams, SQL, Salesforce, SAP, and hundreds of other connectors
- Extend with MCP servers — plug in remote HTTP MCP servers, including MCP servers backed by connectors
- Build custom tools in plain Python — drop a
.pyfile intools/, decorate functions with@tool, and pull in any package you need - Run agents on durable workflows (experimental, see Dynamic workflows) — one frontmatter flag turns on a DAG-of-tools execution model that fans out, waits, and survives restarts, without burning tokens on intermediate results
- Automatic HTTP and MCP endpoints — optionally expose your agent as an HTTP chat API and MCP server with no extra code
- Serverless with built-in session management — scales to zero, persists multi-turn conversations in Azure Blob Storage
- Pluggable model providers — bring OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, or Microsoft Foundry credentials and the runtime auto-detects the right client
Installation¶
The package is published on PyPI as azurefunctions-agents-runtime.
Add it to your function app's requirements.txt:
Where to go next¶
- Getting started — create your first agent and run it locally
- Architecture — module map and data flow pipeline
- Front matter spec — the
.agent.mdandagents.config.yamlfield reference - Triggers — supported trigger types and payload shapes
- Observability — tracing and telemetry
- Dynamic workflows — experimental durable DAG execution
Source code and issues live on GitHub: Azure/azure-functions-agents-runtime.