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I have an Azure web site that generates reports. The reports take ~45 seconds to generate and I'd like to migrate that a worker role to lessen the load on the web site.

I've been researching which tool to use to enable the web site to pass a "report generation request" to the worker role. Azure Queues look like the way to go, but from what I've seen in the Channel 9 Azure Friday series, blog posts and Stackoverflow (Azure Service bus queues topics vs queues for web/worker roles, Writing a listner to Azure Queue), Azure Queue only supports polling.

However, Azure is changing rapidly and this information is a bit old. Is it still the case that Queue's only support polling?

If that's the case would I be better off using Azure Service Bus to pass messages as it supports a Publish/Subscribe model? I'm a little hesitant to use the Service Bus as I don't seam to need any of the features specific to the Service Bus descibed on MSDN.

Community
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Philip Pittle
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2 Answers2

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I believe Azure Queues still only support polling. I can't find any documentation that says otherwise. If you want a publish / subscribe model, Service Bus Queues or Event Hubs may work best for you.

TheDude
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    If Azure Queues doesn't support polling, then what would the primary use case for them be? It's seems it would be quite expensive to pay for CPU time to constantly poll a queue if there wasn't a very large work load (ie only say 30 messages an hour) – Philip Pittle Dec 01 '14 at 19:12
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    The main thing I can think of is cost. Azure Queues cost $0.0005 per 10,000 transactions, but also have a storage cost of $0.07 per GB/month. SB queues cost $0.01 per 10,000 messages with no storage cost. – TheDude Dec 01 '14 at 19:29
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if you're looking for a publish/subscribe messaging pattern, check out Service Bus topics and subscriptions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh367516.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh699844.aspx). Topics and subscriptions are basically Service Bus queues with pub/sub capabilities.

For more background information, you might want to check out this comparison of Azure Queues and Service Bus queues: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh767287.aspx.

Hope that information helps, Seth Manheim Azure Doc Team

Seth Manheim - MSFT
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  • I looked at the pub/sub links and maybe I'm using the wrong terminology. Perhaps the right term is "event driven". I found this article documenting events in Service Bus (http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/introducing-the-event-driven-message-programming-model-for-the-windows-azure-service-bus/). Azure Queues doesn't support this do they? – Philip Pittle Dec 02 '14 at 10:20
  • If you want event driven, use Event Hub: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/event-hubs/ – TheDude Dec 02 '14 at 18:40