Azure Service Bus is the core messaging platform that sits at the heart of many sophisticated Azure-based solutions today. It provides a robust and reliable standards-based information flow between clients, solution subsystems, datacenters and sites. Clients running on any platform can communicate with and through Service Bus using the standardized AMQP 1.0 (ISO/IEC 19464) protocol, or with the familiar HTTPS/REST protocols and toolsets.

Service Bus Messaging is used by many commercial solutions across a broad range of industries, including retail, aviation, automotive, traffic management, manufacturing, banking, insurance, and energy. At Microsoft, it’s used by some of Microsoft’s most demanding services, like Office365, Dynamics CRM, and blockbuster games like Halo.

Service Bus Messaging performs hundreds of billions of operations per month. All in all, Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs together flow over 7 Petabyte of message data volume per month for customers today.

Premium Messaging for predictable performance

Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging is a new offering, now entering public preview, that builds on the successful and reliable foundation of Service Bus Messaging. Premium Messaging provides a number of key enhancements for greater predictability and performance required for the most demanding workloads – paired with an equally predictable pricing model.

Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging provides all capabilities of Azure Service Bus Queues and Topics on top of the ultra-fast Azure Event Hubs message-log engine that supports the flow of over a trillion messages per month in production today.

For enhanced predictability, each Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging namespace is allocated dedicated, reserved processing and memory capacity inside the Service Bus infrastructure.

A Service Bus Premium Messaging namespace with 4 “Messaging Units” is roughly equivalent to a set of 4 primary broker VMs, with further, matching standby failover capacity. The key difference to common dedicated message broker cluster models that you need to set up yourself is that you never need to worry about any aspect of management. With Service Bus Premium Messaging, you benefit from the economics and operational flexibility of a multi-tenant public cloud system, while getting single-tenant reliability and predictability.

Premium Messaging for predictable pricing

The pricing for Service Bus Premium Messaging is a simple, flat daily rate per Messaging Unit purchased. There are no further charges for transactions or brokered connections.

This simple flat rate covers all messaging you use up to the capacity of the Messaging Unit. Namespaces created for Premium Messaging can have 1, 2, or 4 Messaging Units.

Find out more about pricing on the Service Bus pricing page on Azure.com, in the “premium” column.

You can create new premium messaging namespaces in the new Azure portal right now and give the public preview a try.