Azure Service Bus

The Microsoft Azure Service Bus provides cloud-based services that can be leveraged by on-premise and cloud-based applications.  These services are hosted by Microsoft in the Azure data centers located around the world. Customers can consume these services and are billed for the resources they used, making the Service Bus a “Platform as a Service” (PaaS).

Launched as a CTP in 2007 under the name of BizTalk Services, the Service Bus has evolved and matured into an enterprise-class messaging platform. The Service Bus provides synchronous and asynchronous communication

The Microsoft Azure Service Bus provides a number of messaging focused services that can be leveraged by on-premise and cloud-based applications to handle synchronous and asynchronous messaging.

The Service Bus currently consists of the following services.

Relayed Messaging

The Service Bus relay service allows services to expose their endpoints “in the cloud” using a public URL within the Azure service bus namespace. Clients make calls to this public endpoint, and the calls are relayed to the service, which can be hosted on-premise, or hosted by any public cloud provider. Authentication, authorization and transport level encryption are provided by the service bus, and REST and Soap services are supported. The relay service is typically used for synchronous, request-response communication.

Brokered Messaging

Service Bus brokered messaging service provides asynchronous messaging capabilities. Point-to-point messaging is implemented using queues, and publish-subscribe messaging with topics and subscriptions. Brokered messaging has some similarities with queues in the Azure Storage service, but provides much more sophisticated functionality, making it a good choice for many scenarios.

Event Hubs

Service Bus event hubs provide messaging capabilities on a massive scale. Event hubs are built to handle the massive load generated by telemetry data from applications and devices. The emergence of the “Internet of Things” (IoT) and the on-line gaming industry using connected consoles and devices is generating a demand for systems that can handle hundreds of thousands and even millions of messages per second. Service Bus event hubs are able to provide this capacity as an on-demand service, allowing companies to leverage these capabilities and scale them when required.

Notification Hubs

Service Bus Notification Hubs provide application to device messaging capabilities for sending push notifications to mobile devices. Notification hubs can integrate with the messaging services provided by Microsoft, Apple and the Android operating systems to make the transmission of push notifications to multiple device platforms simple to implement.