The Microsoft Azure Event Hubs messaging service processed approximately 150 terabytes and 30 billion messages per day, or 375 000 messages per second, in June 2015, according to the Microsoft Azure Service Bus product team.
Azure Event Hubs is a publish/subscribe ingestion engine in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. Event Hubs use AMQP as a foundational protocol that allows for interoperability with other AMQP 1.0 libraries and brokers. The cloud-based service became generally available in November 2014 and in the month of August peaked at 60 billion transactions in a single day.
Developers can access the service using a REST API, .NET SDK or Apache Qpid client libraries. In addition to these libraries, a C SDK, built on Proton, is planned for the near future.
To get a better perspective on what this milestone means and where Microsoft is heading with this service, InfoQ reached out to Dan Rosanova, senior program manager at Microsoft.
InfoQ: What has been the most challenging aspect of running a messaging platform at this scale?
Dan: The biggest challenge is keeping up with demand. We’re often experiencing double-digit week over week growth and we need to grow capacity all the time. We’re running a fine line between getting capacity online and making sure it’s well utilized. After that it’s making sure that people understand how to use our services effectively. We’re constantly learning and improving.
InfoQ: How does providing a messaging platform at this scale measure up with other competitive offerings?
Dan: The competitive landscape in cloud messaging is very interesting right now. We have some big names in it, like Amazon. Google just brought Pub/Sub out of beta. We also have small names doing innovative things that are quite different from where the big names have gone. Among the biggest names we’ve actually all gone a different direction with our messaging offerings and by chance or design they all do different things quite well. For Service Bus we can confidently say we have the most feature rich messaging PaaS in the market. Anyone from a traditional enterprise messaging background is going to feel at home with Service Bus right away.
InfoQ: In what industries can you find Azure Service Bus messaging solutions?
Dan: Service Bus messaging is used by many commercial solutions across a broad range of industries, including retail, aviation, automotive, traffic management, manufacturing, banking, insurance, and energy. At Microsoft, it’s used by some of Microsoft’s most demanding services, like Office365, Dynamics CRM, and blockbuster games like Halo.
InfoQ: Are there any upcoming capabilities that customers can expect to take advantage of?
Dan: We just released Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging in public preview. This service delivers all the features of Service Bus messaging, that is Queues and Topics, with resource isolation to deliver more consistent and repeatable performance. In effect you get all the benefits of PaaS with all the performance and control of IaaS. It also enables us to deliver messaging at a higher scale than was capable in our shared offering. We continue to improve our services internally and add new features regularly. Our goal is to make sure we can address the needs of our diverse customer base.
