Windows Azure Data Storage

Chapter 5

Service Bus

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understand the different entities that make up Windows Azure Service Bus
• Learn how to implement a publish and subscribe messaging pattern
• Discover some advanced features that are implemented in Service Bus

If you read Chapter 4 on Azure Queue Storage, you might already have in your head that Service Bus is a more advanced queuing mechanism. Well, that is half right. The other half is that the design goal of Service Bus is to enable reliable and scalable communication between different applications while also using a queue to serve messages in only one pattern that can be used to accomplish this. There is support in Service Bus for another commonly used communications pattern: publish and subscribe (frequently called Pub/Sub).

The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to the capabilities that Service Bus provides to both of these message patterns. It includes a description of the Pub/Sub model (a general description of message queues can be found in Chapter 4), the functionality that Service Bus provides in support of both models, and a walkthrough that illustrates how you can implement the different models.

THE HIGH-LEVEL VIEW

You will start by covering the basic components of the Service Bus. Once you have an understanding of these building blocks, it will be much easier to describe the functionality provided by Service Bus in these terms. The components are Brokered Message, Queue Entity, Topic Entity, and Subscription Entity. As you ...