The Broker

At the heart of the message service is the broker, which routes and delivers messages reliably, authenticates users, and gathers data for monitoring performance.

• To establish connections to both application clients and administration clients, the broker supports a number of connection services layered on top of several wire protocols.

• To route and deliver messages, the broker places incoming messages in their respective destinations and manages message flow into and out of these destinations.

• To provide reliable delivery, the broker uses a persistent data store to save state information and persistent messages until they are consumed. Should the broker or the connection fail, the saved information allows the broker to restore the broker’s state and to resume operations.

• To provide security for the data being exchanged the broker uses authenticated connections. Optionally data may be encrypted by running over a secure protocol like SSL. The broker also uses and manages a repository that holds information about users and the data or operations they can access. The broker authenticates users who are requesting services and authorizes the operations they want to carry out by looking up information in this repository.

• To monitor the system, the broker generates metrics and diagnostic information that an administrator can access to measure performance and to tune the broker. Metrics information is also available programmatically to allow applications or administrators to adjust message flow and patterns to improve performance.

The Message Queue service provides a variety of administrative tools that the administrator can use to configure broker support. For more information, see Built-in Administration Tools.