Software:Azure Service Bus

Short description: Message broker on Azure

Azure Service Bus is a fully managed PaaS message broker and is part of the Microsoft's Azure platform. It was first announced as Live Labs Relay Service, and over time evolved into Azure Service Bus and Azure Relay, with their first public releases in 2006. Azure Service Bus decouples applications and services from each other, providing benefits such as load-balancing of messages, routing and transferring data using a publish-subscribe mechanism, and allowing to execute transactional workloads. Azure Service Bus provides similar concepts as other message brokers, such as Apache ActiveMQ. However, users don't need to maintain the underlying platform and infrastructure. Instead, Microsoft does this for them, and sells the service using a pay-for-use billing model

For a comparison of the different Azure messaging services, see the differences between the various Azure messaging services.

Compliance with standards and protocols

Service Bus supports a variety of protocols and standards for communicating with services and applications.

• The primary protocol for Azure Service Bus is Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) 1.0, an open ISO/IEC standard, which allows users to write applications which are compatible with a variety of brokers such as Service Bus, ActiveMQ, or RabbitMQ.
• Service Bus also supports the HTTP protocol, allowing for interoperability in environments where AMQP might be blocked, as it doesn't communicate over default web service ports.
• Service Bus Premium is fully compliant with the Java Message Service (JMS) 2.0 API.

Security and availability

Azure Service Bus uses various security measures to protect against data breaches, such as encryption at rest and in transit, as well as authentication and authorization controls. It supports different security protocols such as Shared Access Signatures (SAS), Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Managed identities for Azure resources.

Azure Service Bus is designed to be highly secure and highly available, ensuring that messages are delivered reliably and consistently. It is built on top of the Azure global infrastructure, which is designed to be highly available and resilient, using multiple data centers and redundant systems to ensure that the service is always available, even in the event of an outage or other issue. Once accepted by the broker, the message is held in durable triple-redundant storage, which can optionally be spread across different datacenters. Users can configure geo-disaster recovery, which enables data processing to continue in a different region when datacenters experience downtime.

Messaging scenarios

In messaging scenarios. data is transferred between different applications and services using messages, which can be encoded with common formats such as JSON, XML, Apache Avro, and Plain Text. By using Azure Service Bus, organizations can easily create and manage messaging systems that are robust, scalable, and secure, enabling them to build highly reliable and efficient distributed systems. Azure Service Bus is suitable for a wide range of messaging scenarios, including:

• Decoupling services and applications
• Enabling reliable communication between distributed systems
• Implementing event-driven architectures
• Implementing workflows and long-running processes
• Publish and subscribe scenarios

See also

• ActiveMQ
• Enterprise Integration Patterns
• Enterprise messaging system
• Message-oriented middleware
• Java Message Service
• Message Queuing as a Service
• Service-oriented architecture