Getting Acquainted With #Azure Service Bus Event Hubs

The Microsoft Azure ecosystem just keeps growing. This week Microsoft unveiled a very welcomed addition to the Microsoft Azure Service Bus. Event Hubs join ranks with Queues, Topics and Relays to offer options adapted to your needs.

Contrasting available Service Bus Flavors?

• Relays – are used to bridge communications over the cloud in a secure and transparent manner.
• Queues – are pipes that allow for many publishes and many consumers to communicate over a single channel. This is great for Competing Consumers and for Queue-based Load Leveling.
• Topics – are pipes that allow fan out scenarios, where each consumer gets his own copy of the inbound queue. It also has some handy features like filters. Use this flavor to implement Pipes and Filters.
• Event Hubs – are a bit more complex. Event Hubs enable the collection of event streams at high throughput, from a diverse set of devices and services. In other words, they help us deal with the 3 Vs.
  • Volume (amount of data)
  • Velocity (speed of data in and out)
  • Variety (range of data types and sources).

Microsoft Azure Service Bus Event Hubs

Event Hub join ranks with Queues, Topics and Relays to offer options adapted to your needs. They province the mechanisms necessary to collection of event streams at high throughput, from a diverse set of devices and services. They are composed of a Published Policy, of Consumer Groups and of Partitions.

Event Hubs support the following scenarios:

• Collecting event streams at high throughput from devices/services for use in real-time and batch processing.
• Connecting millions of devices from diverse platforms for sending data (with individual authentication and flow control).
• Process event streams per device “in order” using several backend services (publish/subscribe).

Considerations Prior to Creating an Event Hub

You must put some effort in capacity planning before you create an Event Hub. In order to make the right decisions let’s go over a couple details about Event Hubs.

Azure Storage Queues VS Azure Service Bus Queues

Updated May 1st 2015

There are two kinds of queues in Microsoft Azure. The first is Azure Storage Queues and the second is Azure Service Bus Queues. Both are quite different.

Meet the Azure Queues

The Azure Storage Queue is capable of handling 2000 message transactions per second and each message has a maximum time to live of 7 days. Billing is calculated by storage transaction and size of the storage used by the queue.

The Azure Service Bus Queue is capable of handling 2000 message transaction per second and messages can live forever! Billing is calculated by the number of 64kb message transactions. This Queue flavor is feature rich and is especially interesting in Hybrid scenarios where part of the application is Cloud based and the other part is on-premise in your data center.

Windows Azure Service Bus & Web API a Match Made in Heaven?

A little while ago the Windows Azure team introduced the message pump pattern to Service Bus Message Bus SDK and it got me thinking about how I could leverage this from any web enabled client.

I wanted to create a long polling REST service that would allow me to extend the message pump pattern over a protected REST service. This is my proof of concept and should not be used in production without a little exploration.

A long poll means that a client makes a request to the server. The server then delays the response until an event occurs. Keep in mind that this is especially useful when you want to communicate events to clients through firewalls. Furthermore, this is a great way to reduce the number of requests made by clients. On the other hand, long poll requests eat up resources, therefore you will need to load test your endpoints in order to identify their limits.

Designing Cloud Services – Consider Bulkiness & Chattiness

Bulky versus chatty applications is a topic that comes up a lot when we design applications on the cloud and believe me it’s not a random topic!

Concepts

When talk about bulky versus chatty, we’re essentially talking about the applications communication style. When the payloads exchanged by the application are large, we say that they are bulky. When we say that an application is chatty, we mean that the application exchanges many messages.

Windows Azure SDK 2.1 Has Been Released!

On July 31 2013, the Windows Azure team has released the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 and it’s full of goodies!

Visual Studio Server Explorer
In Server Explorer, instantly view information about running cloud services, storage accounts, virtual machines, and service bus resources. Also in Server Explorer, filter your view of resources by subscription, region, or both to show only the information that you care about right now.

• Information is automatically populated so that you don’t have to request the information on each node to see the information.
• You can filter the resources that appear so that you can focus on your current work without being distracted by information from unrelated projects. See How to: Filter Windows Azure Resources in Server Explorer.
• Nodes for cloud services are now labeled by deployment so that you can easily locate Production and Staging deployments.

Get More Bang For Your Buck With Windows Azure!

Getting more bang for your buck from a Windows Azure solution can be achieved by paying attention to implementation details.