Azure Service Bus: next step with enhanced Messaging

Microsoft has the vision to make a complete Service Bus available in the Azure cloud.  One basic and essential component of an integration solution is Messaging.  At TechEd 2011, a session was dedicated to this Messaging part.

A screenshot from the presentation.   Also interesting to see the other pieces of the service bus that are on their way: Service Management and Integration.







The queuing solution has support for

• Point-2-point (queuing)
• Publish/subscribe. 
• Message correlation using Correlation ID
• TTL - Time To Live of messages
• Mark message as complete after processing (no distributed transactions or 2-phase commit)
• Duplicate detection (or idempotency)
• Multiple API's: WCF and HTTP/REST

and all the other goodies when using a Messagnig solution: reliable communication, asynchronous, variable timing, throttling and more.

In this pre-release (Community Technology Preview), the max. message size is 256 kB and queue size of max. 1 GB. This is too small for quite some B2B transactions.  From that we derive that the focus of the Messaging and thus Service Bus is (currently) more focused on use by Azure applications and not for B2B communication between partners (yet).

Author: Guy