Welcome to the Messaging Party Google

This week Google announced the public release of Cloud Pub/Sub and we on the Azure Service Bus team would like to welcome them to the cloud messaging space. This is a big and growing market with a diverse set of competitors, technologies, and strategies. We feel that Google’s decision to enter this space validates our investments in Service Bus Messaging (Queues and Topics) and reflects the growing realization in the industry that messaging is a critical component of scalable applications and a vital part of any cloud architecture and of any cloud platform.

While it may at first appear that Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Service Bus Messaging are directly competing with each other the services are quite different and each has its own strengths. More importantly the real competition for both our services, and the other players in the space, is not each other, but direct application integration.

There has always been a tendency to directly wire applications to each other in a piecemeal organic fashion that results in brittle tightly coupled software. This tendency predates cloud computing and even network computing. Experienced architects know the problems that arise from this design – and know to avoid it. The cloud amplifies these problems. Hopefully Google will now impress on another group of engineers and architects the importance of well-established architectural principles of loose coupling and separation of concerns. Principles that have always been at the center of  messaging architecture and guiding points for the Azure Service Bus.