Is MSMQ available on Azure

Question

I want to use WCF + net.MSMQ, I am not interested in Azure Service Bus or Azure queue, those things are way too expensive and do not meet my requirement for setting up a P2P services.

Reliability is not an issue either, the system has a built in mechanism already to check for missing messages - in case of a serious hardware failure.

Given all that if I had a service inside a Web/Worker role with the following line of code, will this work, again reliability of such local storage aside:

MessageQueue.Create(newQueuePath, isTransactional)

Also will the call to the WCF MSMQ service succeed behind the load balancer, from both an external/internal endpoint?

Cowbind

Answer 1

There is currently no MSMQ platform offering from Windows Azure as Azure Storage Queues and Azure Service Bus are deemed to be a replacement.

However, every blog, report, and knowledgeable person is foreboding an inevitable release of IAAS offering from Microsoft "sometime real soon now". When that happens, running products like MSMQ in Azure will be possible.

Innerve

I hope so. Thanks for the reply. As much as I can see uses for Azure Queues and Service Bus, they tied up the application too much to Azure services. Which is fine where the benefit demands it, but for many projects and mine no exception, this isn't the case. – Cowbind

has there been an update to azure or aws offerings for msmq? – Gnathonic

Answer 2

Our team owns MSMQ and Service Bus. We're actively working on making it easy to bridge between those two technologies and we will also make the Service Bus messaging engine available locally. It should be fairly straightforward to build a thin abstraction now that lets you use the one or the other.

You might also want to look at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Brokered-Messaging-MSMQ-a31c6644

Boost

I hope this service bus solution address the needs of a fully distributed, decentralized system. Right now this is the sore missing link in the Service Bus / Queue architecture. Everything goes into the IP address, which load balance it all you want if the volume is too big, even the switch is gonna start failing. Of course you could build a software abstraction to load balance between service busses, but at that point it's very complex, why not just start off with MSMQ in some situation that'd actually be more scalable? – Cowbind

It's not clear to what you're referring to. Windows Azure Service Bus is a multi-node cluster system with several dozen front- and backends per scale-unit with failover that we run as PaaS. – Boost

One other note, each server only has limited hdd, so if the service bus can't keep up, we'll have systematic buffer overflow. All the 100 servers are gonna crash hard. – Cowbind

Alwyn -- Your comments don't make too much sense to me, frankly. You're talking about a scenario with a 20TB/hr, which comes down to more than 50 GBit/sec sustained internal throughput. What sort of infrastructure are you running that on today? How do you get to "100 servers"? What are you looking to store on disk and how many disks? How do you get to buffer overflow and hard crashes out of that? – Boost

Are you familiar with Map Reduce? Hadoop? Twister? And the concept of a node? I want the communication between nodes to be handled by distributed MSMQ. It doesn't make sense to load balance the service bus, it's too expensive, too heavy in every way and from any angle. – Cowbind

I am familiar with those concepts. Your goal and assertions just don't seem to make a lot of sense. – Boost

Referenced link no longer works. Is an updated link available? – Fitzgerald

Answer 3

There isn't an Azure version of MSMQ.

I believe there's nothing to migrate from MSMQ to Azure Queue

Overgrow