Hello and welcome back. In this session, we're going to discuss queues. This section will cover the use of queues within Azure. We'll cover core queue concepts, including how queues fit within the storage account, as well as how queues are organized and the messages they contain.

Queues offer a resilient message service. These messages can be accessed using HTTP and HTTPS. This allows you to develop decoupled applications that communicate with each other using the service. You can also develop components that run in different environments, such as Cloud, Desktop, On-Premises servers and devices, and you can connect these together with Azure queues.

The main use of queues are scheduling a backlog of work to be processed asynchronously, passing messages between web and worker roles, supporting flexible scaling of different components, and building workflows. This course explains how to add and process messages, retrieve a batch of messages, and scale queues.

This diagram illustrates how queues fit within the storage hierarchy. We first create a storage account within which we can create multiple queues. Each queue will have a collection of messages. In this case, we have created a storage account for movies. We have then created a queue to hold messages of instructions for an application to make updates to the tables holding directors and actors data.

Queue storage gives you a way to create messages to pass instructions between applications, which therefore support asynchronous work flows. This allows you to design a set of decoupled applications, including allowing you to design an overall solution using elements hosted in Azure and On-Premise. The queues are accessed using a similar URL to blobs, files, and tables. In this case, we have a high level address to access queues within a storage account, moviesstorageacount.queue.core.windows.net, followed by a string for the queue name which is directors.

In this demo, we'll illustrate how to create a queue directly using Visual Studio. So let's go to Visual Studio now and get started. I'm here in Visual Studio and I've got the Cloud explorer loaded up, and if we click on the queues, it's as simple as saying create queue, and then we can create a queue here and, again, we'll use the word directors. Click enter, and then at the bottom you can click open queue editor, and here we can add a message, so click on the button at the top that says add message, and here all we're going to do is type a single message and it's going to instruct it to delete the director, click okay. Now there's a message in the queue. It's as simple as that.

Stay tuned, because in the upcoming video we're going to learn more about Azure SQL database.