Azure Service Bus for InShorts: A Deeper Dive
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Azure Service Bus for InShorts: A Deeper Dive

Understanding the Problem

InShorts, being a news aggregation app, deals with a massive influx of data daily. The challenge lies in ensuring that this data (news articles) is delivered to users in a timely and efficient manner. The backend needs a robust system to handle this volume without compromising on speed or reliability. The ultimate question that would come in the mind is, how would InShorts be able to do it? If they were hosted on Azure platform, how would they be handling such huge influx and timely delivery of news to our devices?

Now there can be multiple solutions when we visualize how backend would be function and work, but for this case study let's take Azure Service Bus as one of the viable solutions of this problem statement.

Azure Service Bus as the Solution

Azure Service Bus is a cloud messaging service that acts as a mediator between different parts of an application.

In the context of InShorts:

  • Topic Creation: A central "NewsUpdates" topic is created. This is like a bulletin board where all new news articles are posted.
  • Subscriptions: Multiple subscriptions are attached to this topic. Each subscription represents a different function within the app:
    • User Notification Subscription: This subscription receives new articles and immediately sends them to users via push notifications.
    • Data Archiving Subscription: This subscription stores the articles in a long-term storage solution (like Azure Blob Storage) for future reference or analysis.
    • Personalized Content Subscription: This subscription analyzes the article content and sends relevant articles to specific users based on their preferences.
  • Message Publishing: When a new article is received, it's published to the "NewsUpdates" topic. This is like posting a note on the bulletin board.
  • Message Consumption: Each subscription has a listener that's constantly checking for new messages. When a new message arrives, the listener processes it according to its purpose:
    • User Notification Subscription: The listener extracts the essential details (headline, summary, link) and sends a push notification to the user's device.
    • Data Archiving Subscription: The listener stores the complete article in Azure Blob Storage.
    • Personalized Content Subscription: The listener analyzes the article's content and tags it with relevant keywords. It then compares these tags with the user's preferences and sends the article to the user if there's a match.

Benefits of Using Azure Service Bus

  • Scalability: It can handle a huge volume of messages without slowing down.
  • Reliability: Ensures that messages are delivered even if there are temporary network issues.
  • Decoupling: Different parts of the application can communicate without directly depending on each other. This makes the system more flexible and easier to maintain.
  • Integration: Works seamlessly with other Azure services, making it easy to build complex applications.

In essence, Azure Service Bus can act as a reliable and efficient communication backbone for InShorts, ensuring that news articles reach users promptly and accurately!

Note*: This article is an over simplified version of InShorts application architecture. The purpose of this article is to just explain how service can be used to solve a particular use case. There are many other components when we talk about an enterprise grade application serving millions of users which we have not mentioned/discussed here!*