Azure Functions vs Microsoft Foundry Routines: Which One Should You Use for AI Agents?
If you're scheduling AI agents in Azure, you've probably defaulted to Azure Functions. But Microsoft Foundry just introduced something that might change your approach — Foundry Routines. I recently built the same AI agent health check using both Azure Functions and Foundry Routines to see how they compare. The results were eye-opening. The Use Case I created an AI agent called HealthCheckAgent in Microsoft Foundry with a web search tool. The goal: ping the agent every 10 minutes, verify it responds, check if it used the web search tool, and log a status summary. Simple enough. But the setup complexity was very different depending on which approach I used. Azure Functions: Powerful but Heavy To get a Python timer-triggered Azure Function running, I needed a Function App (Flex Consumption plan since Python requires Linux), a Storage Account, Managed Identity with Entra ID authentication, IAM role assignments on the Foundry resource, three environment variables, and a deployment ...