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In distributed architectures, different parts of our system will need to provide information to other parts as events happens. One way we could solve this is to provision dedicated queues for each consumer and send messages asynchronously to decouple them from message senders. However, this wouldn’t scale if we had to do this for large amounts of consumers, and what if some consumers where only interested in parts of the information that producers send....

In most cases, we will our applications to process a sequence of messages in the order that they arrive. This is especially the case if and when we need to scale out our message processors to handle any increased load in messages. This isn’t always an easy task, because as our application scales out, instances can often pull messages from the queue independently, similar to how this happens when implementing the Competing Consumers pattern....

Client-side applications often rely on APIs to provide data and functionality, which are either in your control, or provided by a 3rd party. We usually communicate with these APIs using HTTP(S) protocols and REST. Usually, these APIs are designed to respond quickly to requests. However, there can be a variety of things that affect the latency response from these APIs. These include network infrastructure, how many clients are attempting to call the API, the difference in location between the caller and API itself etc....

Applications in the cloud can be subjected to heavy peaks of traffic in intermittent phases. If our applications can’t handle these peaks, this can lead to performance, availability and reliability issues. For example, imagine we have an application that stores state temporarily in a cache. We could have a single task within our application that performs this for us, and we could have a good idea of how many times a single instance of our application would perform this task....

The Priority Queue pattern is a pattern that allows us to prioritize requests sent to services so that higher priority requests are received and processed faster than lower priority requests. This is useful for when we are building applications where we need to prioritize some clients over others, or if some requests need to be processed faster than usual for business/compliance reasons. In this article, I’ll talk about what the Priority Queue pattern is, what advantages priority queues can provide, what we need to consider when implementing the Priority Queue pattern and how can implement it priority queues in Azure (Spoiler alert, it’s a little hacky!...