Windows Azure Service Bus

Windows azure service bus provides infrastructure for communication, event distribution, naming and service publishing.

Azure Service bus features:

1. It provides connectivity option for WCF and other service endpoints (including REST endpoints) running behind firewalls and NAT routers, bound to frequently-changing or dynamically-assigned IP addresses.
2. It enables secure inbound communication from devices outside the firewall.
3. It provides relayed messaging capabilities. The relay service supports direct one-way messaging, request/response messaging, full duplex messaging, and peer-to-peer messaging.
4. It provides brokered (asynchronous) messaging capabilities. It supports publish-subscribe and temporal decoupling, i.e., sender and receiver don’t have to be online at same time. It reliably stores message until receiving party is ready to receive message. The core components of brokered messaging are- Queues, Topics and Subscriptions.
5. It provides a global namespace system that is location- independent, i.e., the name of service in the service bus provides no information about the final destination of the communication.
6. Provides a service registry for publishing and discovering service endpoint references in a service namespace.
7. It builds and hosts service endpoints that supports:

a)      Exposing a web service to remote users. Expose and secure a local web service in the cloud without managing any firewall or NAT settings

b)     Eventing behavior. Listen for notification on any device, anywhere in the world.

c)      Tunneling between any two endpoints to enable bidirectional streams.