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Azure Event Grid is by far not a new kid on the block. Announced in January 2018, the service promised to get us closer to the event-driven architecture and replace the cumbersome polling for communication between services with a simple mechanism - pub/sub. Other the course of two years, we've seen some Azure services adding a few events, unleashing the power of Event Grid. Yet the list of services and their corresponding events are still shy to call it done-done. Current services providing some events are:

Working with a remote broker can be a challenge at times. The latency caused by the roundtrip to the broker to fetch a single message can exceed the processing time of that message. To help with this problem, Azure Service Bus (ASB) offers a prefetching option to retrieve messages before they are requested. This option is available with all three clients capable of retrieving messages: MessageReceiver, QueueClient, and SubscriptionClient. When a message is requested, and this option is turned on, the ASB client retrieves more messages. The additional messages are kept in a memory buffer until the user code requests the next message. Except for this time, the client will not fetch it from the broker but rather from the in-memory buffer. That beats the latency and improves the overall throughput of the application or the system performing message processing.

Azure Functions design is a modular design. It consists of

The principle of the auto-forwarding feature is simple and straightforward.
Thought use cases are not always obvious, and implementation sometimes can get a twist.
If you'd like to learn more, read all about the feature in my post here.

This week had an opportunity to present at the great Techorama conference. This year it was hosted in the Netherlands, executed by Dutch and Belgian teams. For a first time conference, I was amazed how well it was set up, the flawlessness, the speaker line, and the excitement they have managed to build around the event for both speakers and attendees. Not to mention the venue that was perfectly suited for the event, spacious, and filled with natural light while being there for two days.

This is a follow-up post discussing how to deal with large messages. This time, I'm looking at implementing Claim Check pattern in a simple manner, using Azure Storage Queues, which is powering Azure Service Bus ServiceBus.AttachmentPlugin implementation.

Whenever you deal with messages, message size is always a question you'll have to answer and address. If you're interested some of the factors going into message size and high-level options to tackle the challenge, continue here.

In the previous post Processing Azure EventGrid events with NServiceBus, I showed how to process custom events emitted to EventGrid using NServiceBus.