Azure Storage Queues - Overview

What is Azure Storage Queues?

Azure Storage Queues provide a reliable, highly scalable, and simple message queuing service for asynchronous communication between application components. They enable decoupling of tasks, improve resiliency, and support massive workloads without the overhead of managing infrastructure.

Key capabilities

• Unlimited queue length
• Message size up to 64 KB (or 1 MB with Base64 encoding)
• Visibility timeout & message TTL
• Poison-message handling with dead-letter support
• Strong consistency and geo-redundancy

Typical scenarios

• Background processing (e.g., image resizing)
• Task scheduling and fan-out/fan-in patterns
• Decoupling microservices
• Rate limiting and throttling

Quick start

// C# example: creating a queue and adding a message
var connectionString = "YourStorageConnectionString";
var queueClient = new Azure.Storage.Queues.QueueClient(connectionString, "myqueue");

// Create the queue if it doesn't already exist
await queueClient.CreateIfNotExistsAsync();

// Add a message to the queue
await queueClient.SendMessageAsync("Hello, Azure Queue!");

Message lifecycle

When a message is retrieved, it becomes invisible for a configurable period (visibility timeout). If not deleted within that timeframe, it becomes visible again for other consumers.

Best practices

• Use exponential back‑off when retrying failed operations.
• Leverage Batch Dequeue to improve throughput.
• Set appropriate MessageTTL to avoid stale data.
• Monitor queue length and latency via Azure Monitor.

Next steps

Continue with the Getting Started guide to create your first queue in the Azure portal, or jump to the Code Samples section for language‑specific examples.