Service Bus Preview in the new Azure portal

Published on : Aug 1, 2016

Category : Microsoft Azure

arunkumar

Author

Microsoft recently announced the availability of Service Bus Messaging and Azure Event Hubs in the new Azure Portal. Service Bus Management through the new Azure Portal has been a long standing request from the community and users. It is understood that Microsoft is and will be migrating capabilities from classic portal to the new one progressively. Subsequently, Microsoft released Service Bus Preview. This blog will summarize a first hand experience of the capabilities in the new Portal also  explaining how to do certain tasks in the new portal when compared to the classic portal. In the new Azure Portal, Click Browse on the left menu and search for Service Bus

What can you do in this preview?

1. Browse the list of namespaces available in the subscription. This includes the list of namespaces created through the classic portal.Service Bus Namespaces 2. Add a new Service Bus namespace. Though the recent announcement suggests, namespaces for Messaging and EventHub can be created separately, the preview doesn’t seem to have the option that allows the user to select the namespace type. Users can select between 3 pricing tiers – Basic, Standard & Premium. Of which, Premium allows the option of selecting Messaging UnitsCreating Service Bus Namespace 3. Managing Namespaces. Users will no longer be able to create mixed namespaces that supported all types viz. Messaging, EventHub neither through classic nor the new portal. Using this type, users were able to manage Queues, Topics, Relays and EventHubs under a single namespace. Moving forward, users can only create namespaces individually for Messaging (Queus & Topics), Relays and EventHubs. Microsoft has a valid point in doing so.
“Breaking these services out into their own namespaces will allow us to optimize our infrastructure, and therefore improve performance.”
Currently, Preview seems to create namespace of Messaging type only. But, the current change in architecture seem to be contradicting as well. A user could create a namespace of Messaging type in the new portal. This is supposed to support only Queues and Topics. At this stage, users could add Event Hubs to this namespace through Classic portal. In the screenshot below, namespace – arun360-ns03 is created using the new portal.Service Bus Namespace in Classic Portal A different understanding means that, messaging namespace will act like a mixed namespace for at least now, but the new portal will allow only to manage resources corresponding to their namespace types. Users having Event Hubs on Messaging namespaces could manage the namespace only though classic portal. They will have to plan migrating the resources before Microsoft phases out capabilities in the classic portal as well as in the architecture. In the screenshot below, it could be seen that new portal don’t support Event Hub management in a Messaging namespace that contain Event Hubs.Event Hub Error in New Portal Compare the two screenshots below. The first list from the classic portal displays namespaces of all 3 types.Service Bus Namespaces type list in Classic Portal But, the new portal doesn’t display the namespace of type – Notification Hub (sb02-ns05). Also this list is not intuitive, users are not able to differentiate the  namespace type as easily as in the classic portal.Service Bus Namespaces type list in New Portal Also, consider the case of a namespace of type Event Hub (sb02-ns06eh). It is technically a namespace confined to handle Event Hubs  only as seen in the list displayed in Classic Portal. The new portal allows to create Queues & Topics in it, but don’t display Event Hubs. This adds more confusion.EventHub Namespace type allows to create Queues & Topics 4. Fetching Connection String for a Namespace was very easy and direct in the classic portal. But in New Portal it is hidden in the Shared Access Policies. It may be difficult for the users who uses this preview for the first time. In the new portal, navigate to your namespace -> All Settings -> Shared Access Policies Select the Access policy in the list (Add a new one as required) from which you need to collect the Connection String.
Unlike, classic portal, where it displays connection string based on primary key, the new portal lists connection strings based on Primary as well as Secondary Keys
Fetching Connection String Information in New Portal 5. Create a Queue with standard properties and settingsCreate a Queue in New Portal 6. Create a Topic with standard properties and settingsCreate a Topic in New Portal 7. Manage General Settings and Shared Access Policies at Resource LevelGeneral Settings All the above three actions are intuitive and easy in the new portal. 8. Moving Resources between Subscription It is now possible to move resources between subscriptions under the logged in account.Moving Resources between Subscriptions 9. Automation scripts to deploy resources to Azure The new portal provides Automation Scripts that can be used through Azure CLI, PowerSell, .Net & Ruby. As it can be seen, it is work in progress and has some errors pertaining to templates. It would add more value, if these scripts can be prefilled with the values of the selected resource through which these scripts are being retrieved.Automation Scripts Hope this article gives an insight into the recently launched Service Bus preview in the new Azure portal.