Particular Software Blog

The Power of Cosmos DB Comes to NServiceBus

With the recent preview release of NServiceBus.Persistence.CosmosDB, you can now use Azure Cosmos DB with NServiceBus! Backed by Cosmos DB, a fully managed, globally distributed, elastically scaled, pay-as-you-go service, your NServiceBus-based systems can benefit from guaranteed single-digit-millisecond latency with 99.999% availability. If you are already using Cosmos DB to store your business data, you no longer need to use a different storage technology to store your NServiceBus saga data.

What's new in ServiceInsight 2.2

A common problem with most distributed systems is that it’s hard to get a good view of how all the disconnected pieces work together—unless you’re using ServiceInsight. From the audit records of successfully processed messages, ServiceInsight shows how messages are related and gives you visualizations so you can better understand how one message results in another, and how the different parts of the system communicate.

ServiceInsight 2.2 is out now, with plenty of improvements. This release adds new insights (pun intended) to your distributed systems.

Optimizations to scatter-gather sagas

Over the last several months we’ve been noticing that some of our customers were having trouble with the performance of some of their sagas. Invariably, the sagas that were at fault were examples of the scatter-gather pattern, and the ultimate culprit was contention at the storage level due to the optimistic concurrency strategy that was being used.

This is a fairly common pattern for sagas to implement, and we didn’t want our customers to have to change how they model their business process to get around a performance problem, so we decided to fix it.

In this article, I’ll explain what the scatter-gather pattern is, how a pure optimistic concurrency strategy created a problem, and what we’ve done to fix it for you.

Enhancements in NServiceBus Hosting

The .NET Generic Host has become the de facto method of hosting applications built on .NET Core. To support the generic host, we released the NServiceBus.Extensions.Hosting package to make it simple to host NServiceBus within a .NET Core process or ASP.NET Core web application using the .UseNServiceBus(…) extension method.

While a massive improvement for easily hosting NServiceBus in a .NET Core process, a few rough edges remained. For version 1.1, we aimed to make it easier than ever.

What's new in NServiceBus 7.4

At Particular Software, we don’t believe in packaging all the cool new features into major versions that make it hard to upgrade. We prefer to deliver improvements incrementally in minor releases that are easy upgrades, deferring breaking changes until the next major release to clean things up before the next set of incremental improvements.

That means that when it comes to new goodies, minor releases are where it’s at, and this minor release is no exception.

NServiceBus 7.4 includes some great new enhancements that make mapping sagas easier and more powerful, enable multiple different strategies for message conventions, and subdivide a message flow into multiple conversations.

Support for Azure Functions

Microsoft Azure Functions provide a simple way to run your code in the Azure Cloud. They are easy to deploy, scale automatically, and provide many out-of-the-box ways to trigger your code. Rather than pay for an entire virtual machine, you only pay for compute while your code is being executed.

NServiceBus makes Azure Functions even better. You can use a simple but powerful API to consume and dispatch messages, add robust reliability features like delayed retries, an extensible message processing pipeline, and a suite of tools to help you monitor and maintain your message-driven system. We think they go together like milk and cookies.

Support for .NET Core 3.1 is here!

Supporting NServiceBus on .NET Core 3.1 has been a focus for us here at Particular in 2020. Well, the day is finally here. We’re happy to announce that with the latest version of NServiceBus, you can build and deploy your NServiceBus endpoints on .NET Core 3.1, taking advantage of great features like built-in hosting, logging, and dependency injection.

The end of the legacy Azure Service Bus transport

A while back, we introduced a brand new transport for use with Azure Service Bus. This transport was a necessary step in our Azure offering to allow users to target .NET Standard and .NET Core. It also used the new Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus client rather than the older, deprecated client.

More importantly, it started the process of deprecating the now-legacy Azure Service Bus transport. At the time, we didn’t have details about how we would do that; now we do.

Usability enhancements in ServicePulse 1.25

One of the challenges in building a distributed software system is that with so many processes doing their own thing, it can be hard to get the bird’s-eye view of what’s going on. Is everything healthy? Is the performance ok? Is there anything going on that could cause a problem?

ServicePulse is our application for monitoring your entire distributed system. It’s where heartbeats tell you if endpoints are healthy or have failed. It’s where our monitoring tools tell you how many messages are in each queue, how long it’s taking to process those message, and if the system is able to keep up with the load or is falling behind. It’s also where you find out if messages have failed processing, see the error (without having to dig through log files), and get the system back on track once the error is fixed.

In this post we’ll tell you about some of the usability enhancements we’ve added in our new version, ServicePulse 1.25.

Getting NServiceBus ready for the cloud

More and more companies are realizing that it’s in their best interest to move to the cloud. As software consultants at Headspring, we’re often tasked with helping organizations migrate their highly complex legacy systems to modern cloud environments. For clients using NServiceBus to facilitate messaging, moving to the cloud without it seems untenable. So how do we prepare to take NServiceBus with us?

For complex software systems like the ones we’re used to working with, moving to the cloud often involves more than a simple “lift and shift.” NServiceBus proves to be just as valuable in a cloud environment, but various aspects of its configuration and integration into the system need to be modified in order to take full advantage.

One of our recent clients—a government agency—was already using NServiceBus and wanted to migrate their system to Azure. The steps we took to get NServiceBus ready to run in Azure may be helpful to you as you map your own cloud moves. I’ll walk you through exactly what we had to do differently in the cloud, explain the hybrid-cloud solution we built with NServiceBus for reporting, and demonstrate how we handled logging in the cloud, as well as our client’s need to run locally on occasion.