Hello and welcome to Azure queues. In this brief lecture. We are going to take an introductory look at Azure queues and what they are used for.

The Azure queues storage service is designed to store large numbers of messages. Now these messages aren’t the type that you would normally think of. We’re not talking about emails or anything like that. Instead, these messages are used to facilitate communication between the components of distributed applications. When using Azure queue storage, you can access these messages from anywhere in the world through authenticated calls via HTTP or HTTPS.

The Azure queue service is comprised of several components. These include the URL format, a storage account, a queue, and messages.

To access a queue, you must do so through a specific URL format. The URL for a specific queue will include the storage account name and the queue name. For example, the URL that you see on your screen would be used to access a queue called images to process in a storage account called mystorageaccount.

Speaking of storage accounts, all access to virtually all Azure storage services is provided through a storage account. You can view the storage account as the overarching container that hosts your Azure storage.

The queue itself is actually a set of messages. When you name a queue, you must use all lowercase letters.

And last but not least we have messages. Messages in any format can be up to 64 kB. As I mentioned previously, these messages are used to facilitate communication between the different components of a distributed application.

Join me in the next lesson where I will show you how to create a queue in Microsoft Azure.