10 Azure Service Bus Best Practices

Azure Service Bus is a cloud messaging system that helps businesses connect applications and exchange messages in a secure and reliable way. Service Bus offers a variety of features and capabilities that make it a powerful tool for building cloud-based applications and services.

In this article, we will discuss 10 best practices for using Azure Service Bus. By following these best practices, you can maximize the benefits of using Service Bus and avoid common pitfalls.

1. Avoid using the default namespace

When you create a new Azure Service Bus namespace, it’s automatically assigned a URL that looks something like this:

servicebus.windows.net/mynamespace

The problem is that anyone who knows the name of your namespace can guess the URL and potentially gain access to your data.

To avoid this, always use a custom domain name for your Azure Service Bus namespace. You can do this by creating a CNAME record in DNS that points to the Azure Service Bus URL. For example:

servicebus.mydomain.com IN CNAME servicebus.windows.net/mynamespace

Now, even if someone knows the name of your namespace, they won’t be able to guess the URL.

2. Use a separate subscription for your Service Bus resources

If you have multiple Azure Service Bus resources, it can be difficult to keep track of which resource is using which subscription. By using a separate subscription for each resource, you can more easily see which resource is using which subscription.

Additionally, if you ever need to delete a resource, you can do so without affecting other resources in the same subscription. This is especially important if you’re using shared access keys, as deleting a resource will also delete the associated key.

Finally, using a separate subscription for each resource will help you stay within your subscription limit. If you have multiple resources in the same subscription, you may exceed your subscription limit and be charged for overage.

3. Create a dedicated resource group for each application

When you have multiple applications using the same Azure Service Bus namespace, it can be difficult to manage and monitor them effectively. By creating a separate resource group for each application, you can more easily track usage and performance metrics for each one.

Additionally, if you need to delete an application or make changes to its settings, you can do so without affecting the other applications in your Azure Service Bus namespace. This makes it easier to keep your applications running smoothly and avoid any potential disruptions.

4. Enable auto-forwarding on queues and topics

If a message is sent to a queue or topic and there are no subscribers, the message will be automatically forwarded to another queue or topic. This ensures that messages are never lost and that they are always delivered to the intended recipient.

Auto-forwarding can be configured on both queues and topics, and it’s a good idea to enable it on both. That way, if there are ever any problems with one of the queues or topics, messages will still be delivered successfully.

Enabling auto-forwarding is a simple process, and it’s well worth doing to ensure that messages are always delivered successfully.

5. Consider using partitioned entities

Partitioning is a technique that can be used to scale out the message processing workload by spreading it across multiple message brokers. This is especially important when dealing with high throughput scenarios where a single message broker may not be able to keep up with the demand.

By using partitioned entities, you can ensure that your message processing workload is spread evenly across multiple message brokers, which will help improve performance and prevent any one message broker from becoming overloaded.

6. Use sessions to order messages

If you have a scenario where messages need to be processed in order, using sessions guarantees that messages will be received and processed by your application in the same order that they were sent. This is because when you create a session, a lock is placed on the message until it’s processed. Once the message is processed, the lock is released, and the next message in the queue can be processed.

Without sessions, there’s no guarantee that messages will be processed in the same order that they were sent, which can lead to issues if message order is important for your application.

7. Use dead letter queues to handle poison messages

Poison messages are those that cause your message processing to fail repeatedly. They can be caused by a number of things, such as malformed data or an external system being unavailable.

If you don’t handle poison messages properly, they can clog up your queues and prevent other messages from being processed. That’s why it’s important to have a dead letter queue set up.

A dead letter queue is simply a queue where messages that cannot be processed go to die. By sending poison messages to a dead letter queue, you can ensure that they don’t block other messages from being processed.

You can set up a dead letter queue in the Azure portal. Simply go to your Service Bus namespace, select the Queues tab, and then click on the queue you want to configure. In the Settings section, you’ll see an option for Dead Letter Queue.

Click the Enable button and then enter the name of the queue you want to use as your dead letter queue. Once you’ve done this, all messages that cannot be processed will be sent to the dead letter queue instead of getting stuck in your regular queue.

8. Monitor your Service Bus metrics

By default, Azure Service Bus collects a set of metrics that can help you understand the health and performance of your messaging system. These metrics include things like the number of messages sent, received, or deadlettered; the size of queues or topics; and the age of messages in queues or topics.

Monitoring these metrics can help you detect issues with your messaging system before they cause problems for your users. For example, if you see that the number of messages in a queue is increasing over time, that could be an indication that messages are not being processed as quickly as they’re being added to the queue. This could be due to a problem with the message processor, or it could be due to a sudden increase in the volume of messages being sent to the queue. In either case, it’s important to investigate the issue so that you can resolve it before it causes problems for your users.

There are a few different ways to monitor Azure Service Bus metrics. The Azure portal provides a built-in monitoring experience, which includes a dashboard that displays key Service Bus metrics. You can also use the Azure Monitor service to collect and analyze Service Bus metrics. And finally, you can use a third-party monitoring solution like Datadog to collect and visualize Service Bus metrics.

9. Set up alerts for critical metrics

If you’re not monitoring your Azure Service Bus, you could be missing out on critical information about the health and performance of your messaging system. By setting up alerts, you can ensure that you’re notified immediately if there’s a problem so that you can take action to resolve it.

There are a few key metrics that you should be sure to set up alerts for, including:

– Message throughput
– Message latency
– Dead-letter message count

You can set up alerts in the Azure portal or using PowerShell. For more information on how to do this, see the Azure documentation.

10. Configure geo-disaster recovery

If you have an Azure Service Bus namespace in a single region and that region experiences an outage, your namespace will be unavailable. However, if you configure geo-disaster recovery, your namespace will be replicated to another region. So, if there’s an issue with the primary region, your namespace will failover to the secondary region and remain available.

To configure geo-disaster recovery, you need to create an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. The template will deploy two Azure Service Bus namespaces, one in each region. Then, you’ll need to configure replication between the two namespaces.

Once you’ve deployed the ARM template, you can test failover by manually disabling the primary namespace. Your applications will automatically connect to the secondary namespace, and messages will continue to be processed without interruption.