Azure for Architects

Competing consumers

A single consumer of messages works in a synchronous manner unless the application itself implements the logic of reading messages asynchronously. Competing consumers pattern helps in implementing a solution in which multiple consumers are ready to process the incoming message and they compete to process it. This helps in architecting solutions that are highly available and scalable. It is scalable because with multiple consumers it is possible to process a higher number of messages in the smaller period. It is highly available because there could be at least one or more consumers to process the messages even if some consumers crash.

This pattern should be used when each message is independent of other messages. The messages ...