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Service Bus and operational excellence

  • Article

Fully manage enterprise message brokering with message queues and publish-subscribe topics using Azure Service Bus. This service stores messages in a broker (for example, a queue) until the consuming party is ready to receive the messages.

Benefits include:

  • Load-balancing work across competing workers.
  • Safely routing and transferring data and control across service, and application boundaries.
  • Coordinating transactional work that requires a high-degree of reliability.

For more information about using Service Bus, reference Azure Service Bus Messaging. Learn how to set up messaging that connects applications and services across on-premises and cloud environments.

To understand how Service Bus promotes operational excellence, reference the following topics:

The following sections are specific to Azure Service Bus and operational excellence:

  • Design considerations
  • Configuration checklist
  • Recommended configuration options
  • Source artifacts

Design considerations

Maximize reliability with an Azure Service Bus uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA). Properly configured applications can send or receive messages, or do other operations on a deployed Queue or Topic. For more information, reference the Service Bus SLA.

Other design considerations include:

Besides the documentation on Service Bus Premium and Standard messaging tiers, the following features are only available on the Premium Stock Keeping Unit (SKU):

  • Dedicated resources.
  • Virtual network integration: Limits the networks that can connect to the Service Bus instance. Requires Service Endpoints to be enabled on the subnet. There are Trusted Microsoft services that are not supported when implementing Virtual Networks (for example, integration with Event Grid). For more information, reference Allow access to Azure Service Bus namespace from specific virtual networks.
  • Private endpoints.
  • IP Filtering/Firewall: Restrict connections to only defined IPv4 addresses or IPv4 address ranges.
  • Availability zones: Provides enhanced availability by spreading replicas across availability zones within one region at no extra cost.
  • Event Grid integration: Available event types.
  • Scale messaging units.
  • Geo-Disaster Recovery (paired namespace).
  • BYOK (Bring Your Own Key): Azure Service Bus encrypts data at rest and automatically decrypts it when accessed, but customers can also bring their own customer-managed key.

When deploying Service Bus with Geo-disaster recovery and in availability zones, the Service Level Objective (SLO) increases dramatically, but does not change the uptime SLA.

Checklist

Have you configured Azure Service Bus with operational excellence in mind?

Configuration recommendations

Consider the following recommendation to optimize reliability when configuring Azure Service Bus:

Recommendation Description
Connect to Service Bus with the AMQP protocol and use Service Endpoints or Private Endpoints when possible. This recommendation keeps traffic on the Azure Backbone. Note: The default connection protocol for Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus and Windows.Azure.ServiceBus namespaces is AMQP.
Establish a process to actively monitor the dead-letter queue (dlq) messages. The dead-letter queue holds messages that cannot be processed or cannot be delivered to any receiver. It is important to monitor this queue to examine the issue cause, apply required corrections, and to resubmit messages.
Analyze the differences between Azure Storage Queues and Azure Service Bus Queues. You will find that Azure Service Bus Messaging Entities are more advanced, reliable, and feature-rich than Azure Storage Queues. If your requirement is for simple queue messaging without requirements for reliable messaging, then Azure Storage Queues may be a more suitable option.

Source artifacts

  • To identify premium Service Bus Instances that aren't using private endpoints, use the following query:

    Resources
| where
  type == 'microsoft.servicebus/namespaces'
| where
  sku.tier == 'Premium'
  and isempty(properties.privateEndpointConnections)

  • To identify Service Bus Instances that are not on the premium tier, use the following query:

    Resources
| where
  type == 'microsoft.servicebus/namespaces'
| where
  sku.tier != 'Premium'

Next step

Queue Storage and reliability