Azure Service Bus: High Availability - azure

I'm currently building a hybrid-cloud solution that needs to write messages to a queue for later processing. It is absolutely imperative that the queue is highly available (99.999+% uptime).
My options are to read/write messages to a local ZeroMQ high availability pair, or an Azure Service Bus. I would prefer to go the Azure Service Bus route, but can't find any documentation regarding high availability configuration for Azure Service Bus.
Has anyone had success setting up Azure Service Bus for high availability? I understand that the SLA for a single instance of any Azure service cannot be changed. I'm thinking more along the lines of the failover capabilities of Azure Web Apps.

The main thing you can do for consuming a service at a higher than SLA value is to ensure you are handling retry logic. The key here will be the temporal nature of any outage, and tuning a retry backoff to handle edge cases. Some use linear or exponential backoffs to wait even longer for the service to come back up.
Also, you can have more than one service bus in a different region for georedundancy, and either load balancing messages across the two or use one as a hot backup. This can get you around any regional outages and keep your service up when one data center is not meeting its local SLA.

You can find the for SLA for Azure Service Bus here: legal/sla/service-bus/v1_0/
For Service Bus Relays, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time,
properly configured applications will be able to establish a
connection to a deployed Relay. For Service Bus Queues and Topics, we
guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time, properly configured
applications will be able to send or receive messages or perform other
operations on a deployed Queue or Topic. For Service Bus Basic and
Standard Notification Hub tiers, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of
the time, properly configured applications will be able to send
notifications or perform registration management operations with
respect to a Notification Hub. For Event Hubs Basic and Standard
tiers, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time, properly
configured applications will be able to send or receive messages or
perform other operations on the Event Hub.

We've had Service Bus Relay up and running for 5+ years and have had one outage. It was an outage at the specific data center the relay was provisioned in and touched many services. After that we implemented redundancy by implementing a secondary Service Bus Relay namespace in a different data center location. The reconfigured code was set to check the connectivity on every connection and switch the primary and secondary connections. We treated them as equals so once we "failed over" that namespace would become primary.

Service Bus now supports Geo-disaster recovery and Geo-replication at the namespace level.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/service-bus-geo-dr

Related

How read from 2 Azure Service Buses in different regions and treat it as one

I have nearly identical service buses in 2 separate regions. I am trying to make them be more region agnostic for consuming applications.
While looking into things like Azure service bus geo-disaster recovery and message replication and cross-region federation and how complicated they are, I was thinking instead that I could create a service bus client that would just read from the same topic/subscription name in separate regions and treat them as if they came from the same region.
While I'm sure this can be implemented, I was wondering, does this functionality exists in any current Microsoft libraries? Basically, if message A get published to the east topic/subscription and message B gets published to the Central US topic/subscription, then the client would receive A and B. The order is not important.
Thanks!
Some sort of functionality has existed in the track 0 SDK of Azure Service Bus SDK for failover but not concurrent execution. As it was a client-side feature, it did not get much traction and was very confusing and complicated.
NServiceBus had a legacy Azure Service Bus transport that supported using more than one namespace concurrently. The feature was deprecated as it was also more of a trouble than good. Not to mention the fact that Service Bus has introduced the Premium tier which would handle availability better than multiple standard namespaces together. On top of that, add availability zones and it's hands down a better option than the complexity of setting up multiple receivers.
In case your namespaces are identical, I would suggest consolidating them. One of the strategies would be to "forward" messages from one namespace to another using some processor as there's no cross-namespace forwarding.

Azure Service Bus: How to achieve eventual consistency when a subscriber goes down

Currently I am using Azure Service Bus as a means to communicate and keep data consistent among the different services in my platform. However, let's say that one of my services (subscribers) goes down for an extended period of time and is unable to receive any events. Suddenly this service is in an inconsistent state.
Does Azure Service Bus have any type of "event sourcing" solution in place in order to replay my events? I understand that Azure Event Hubs has this feature where I can store events in an append only fashion to azure blob storage. However, the only thing I am finding for Azure Service Bus is the dead letter queue and my understanding that this is only used when no subscribers are capable of processing an event.
Is this something that I will have to build myself?
All events stored in a subscription will be delivered once the consumer is up and running unless the subscription has DefaultMessageTimeToLive (TTL) set to purge messages.

Azure Service Bus, check if ASB is throttled by using SDK

We use Azure Service Bus to send messages from one service to another. Producer produces quite huge amount of messages(a couple of millions) during 1-2 hours. As a result our Service Bus(we use Premium Azure Service Bus) is throttled and we receive errors on producer and consumer sides. I wonder if we could check somehow the load of our ASB by using Azure SDK(we use ASB Java SDK) and if it is high we can slow down the services that sends messages into the queue/topic.
I also understand that we can add more Premium units, but it is the last option we will take.
What we use:
Azure Service Bus Java SDK
Java 9 and Spring Boot 2.0
Azure Service Bus Premium version
Do you have any recommendations for my case? Any recommendation - patterns, frameworks, ASB SDK features would be great.
What you usually can do is to check from the portal your usage (from the overview panel), there is no feature in the SDK itself that can show you the load on your service bus namespace.
Since you're using premium messaging, there is no certain threshold that can determine if you've exceeded your messaging unit capacity or not.
you will get throttling errors as shown in the documentation:
Also be aware that you can scale up and down according to your usage with how many messaging units you want.

Azure Service Bus synchronize all masterdata

Let's say I've got an azure service bus in a microservice scenario.
One microservice pushes master data changes to the other services with a subscription.
Now let's say a new service is introduced and subscribes to the master data service. How can I make sure that the new service receives all neccessary data?
Do I have to resend all master data on the master data service or does the azure service bus (or alternatives) provide some features for that?
As far as I know there is no way to achieve what you want within the capabilities of Azure Service Bus. Also, I don't think this what Service Bus is there for.
Of course there is a configurable "time to live" value for messages within queues and topics, which could probably be set to some really high value, but this would still not make your master data be infinitely available for future services. And - but this is just my opinion and I'm far from being an expert - I wouldn't want to load up my service bus with potentially thousands or even millions of messages (depending on what you're doing) without them being processed quickly.
For your specific concern I'd rather implement something like a "master data import service" without any service bus integration. Details of this, however, depend on your environment and specific requirements.
Couple of points:
1) This is not possible with Azure Service bus. Even If you set TTL at Topic level, the messages will only be delivered to available subscriptions at that point of time. you cant read messages directly from Topic.
2) you can consider Eventhub option where you can create new consumer group with offset from when you want to start reading messages but Eventhub has maximum retention period as 7 days. If you need message retention beyond 7 days, enabling Event Hubs Capture on your event hub pulls the data from your event hub to the Storage account. But in this case you would require additional logic to read from this storage account to replay the messages.

High availability of Azure Service Bus and Function Apps

I'm struggling at understanding if and what needs to be done to provide for high availability of two different types of Azure resources:
Azure Service Bus
Function Apps
Service Bus guarantee at least 99.9% of the time for most of the service (includes Relay, Queues and Topics, Notification Hubs). Besides, replication and partitioning messaging entities (Each partitioned queue or topic consists of multiple fragments. Each fragment is stored in a different messaging store. If the corresponding messaging store is unavailable, Service Bus writes the message to a different fragment, if possible.) could be used as common solution for high availability.
The following article would be helpful, please read it.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Azure Service
Bus
For Function Apps running on App Service Plans Microsoft guarantee that the associated Functions compute will be available 99.95% of the time. So if possible, you could run your Function App on an App Service Plan and enable the Always On setting.

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