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In Windows Azure it's possible to create public Blob Container. Such a container can be accessed by anonymous clients via the REST API.

Is it also possible to create a publicly accessible Queue?

The documentation for the Create Container operation explains how to specify the level of public access (with the x-ms-blob-public-access HTTP header) for a Blob Container. However, the documentation for the Create Queue operation doesn't list a similar option, leading me to believe that this isn't possible - but I'd really like to be corrected :)

Mark Seemann
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At this time, Azure Queues cannot be made public.

As you have noted, this "privacy" is enforced by requiring all Storage API calls made in RE: to queues to be authenticated with a signed request from your key. There is no "public" concept similar to public containers in blob store.

This would follow best practice in that even in the cloud you would not want to expose the internals of your infrastructure to the outside world. If you wanted to achieve this functionality, you could expose a very thin/simple "layer" app on top of queues. A simple WCF REST app in a web role could expose the queuing operations to your consumers, but handle the signing of api requests internally so you would not need the queues to be public.

Taylor Bird
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  • Yes, but running a thin layer of web roles for the sole purpose of authentication is a waste of money (compute instances cost money, you know). It would be much better if you could just post straight to a queue, but not read from it. That would be equivalent to hitting a publicly available web site. – Mark Seemann Jan 27 '11 at 18:41
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    Just remember that you can host that WCF REST app anywhere, including the Worker Role that processes the queues in Azure, saving you from creating yet another role (and additional instances). You can then scale up your worker role as demand requires it, but hopefully you can achive economy of scale with a hosted thin layer running alongside your queue-processing code. – David Makogon Jan 27 '11 at 23:09
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You are right, the Azure storage queues won't be publicly accessible like the blobs (Uris). However you may still be able to achieve a publicly consumable messaging infrastructure with the appfabric service bus.

IUnknown
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I think the best option would be to setup a worker role and provide access to the queue publicly in that manner. Maybe with AppFabric Service Bus for extra connectivity/interactivity with external sources.

? Otherwise - not really clear what the scope might be. The queue itself appears to be locked away at this time. :(

Adron
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