Ask HN: Advice for executing cloud computing CPU intensive task

Recently I build a .NET Core API where I handle basic CRUD operations. But now I have to integrate file processing tasks like image compression, Excel spreed-sheets and I plan to add more stuff.

On my dev machine (i7-3770) a 50mb Excel file processing takes around 20 seconds, I do lots of validation and then store it in SQL.

But when I deployed it to my Azure App Service, it takes around 3 or 4 mins and cripples the API response time.

I moved those CPU intensive task to an Azure Function so it will not affect my API performance, but file processing took around the same time 5 mins or timeouts.

I'm using Azure Function Consumption plan because these tasks are sporadic and it might be certain occasions that I need to run more than 1 file in parallel, so I don't want to have an high CPU config service running 24/7.

Basically, I'm looking into a more powerful version of Azure Functions Consumption Plan with more CPU/RAM assigned to it.

If there's a better way of doing this, I'm all ears.