Some of you may be surprised to hear that Service Bus messaging, Azure Event Hubs, and Azure Relay are all worked on by the same team. While there are certainly many similarities between these services, there are also just as many different use cases. As we plan to offer these services in the new Azure portal, there is an upcoming change regarding namespaces. In the past, Service Bus Messaging, Event Hubs and Service Bus Relay all shared a common namespace.

What sort of changes can I expect?

• Beginning in August 2016, Service Bus Messaging and Azure Event Hubs will be available in the new Azure portal.
• When Messaging and Event Hubs become available, newly created namespaces will be unique to the corresponding service. For example, Event Hubs will have an Event Hubs only namespace, and not support messaging or Relay. If you want to use each service, you will need to create a namespace for each.
• For Event Hubs customers that also used messaging, you will not be able to see your Event Hubs listed under your namespaces.
• In late October 2016, Relay will be available on the new Azure portal.
• All of these services will be in preview until at least late October 2016.

One key point to make, none of these changes will have any runtime impact on current namespaces. Our current portal will still support the mixed namespace types but not for long. The support lasts to help customers to successfully migrate to new namespace types under the specific services. Moving forward we want our customers to create queues and topics under the Messaging namespace type, event hub under the Event Hub namespace type and relay under Relay namespace type.

Why are we doing this?

We are using the new Azure Portal as an opportunity to take care of some technical debt. While Service Bus messaging, Azure Event Hubs and Azure Relay are all similar, they are also very different. Breaking these services out into their own namespaces will allow us to optimize our infrastructure, and therefore improve performance. In addition, we would like to make things simpler for our customers in the future, as we have received a lot of feedback about the confusion surrounding how these services are related. The separation will allow us to simplify documentation, provide better reporting on service health, and provide an overall improvement to customer experience and support.

Will I see my existing namespaces under different services in the new portal? Watch this space for posts covering migration scenarios.

To learn more read this blog post for details on how to migrate from Messaging namespace type to Event Hubs namespace type.

We would love to see your questions and feedback. Follow and participate in the conversation on Service Bus Forum or in the comments section below.