# Two Azure queues. Which one do you pick?

> Five questions that settle it, and the one where the cheap option wins.

- **Format:** short video, 10 steps, ~32 seconds
- **Topic:** Service Bus or Queue Storage — the five questions that decide which Azure queue you should actually use.
- **Author:** Suthahar Jegatheesan (MSDEVBUILD)
- **Category:** Azure · Azure
- **Tags:** azure, azureservicebus, azurequeuestorage, servicebus, queuestorage, systemdesign, microsoftazure, azurecloud, cloudarchitecture, dotnet, backenddeveloper, az305, msdevbuild
- **Canonical URL:** https://blog.msdevbuild.com/shorts/azure-service-bus-vs-queue-storage/

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## What you'll learn

- The five questions that decide which Azure queue you need
- Where Queue Storage stops: no topics, no sessions, 64 KB
- Why the cheap queue is the right call for most background work

## Understand it one step at a time

### 1. Two queues. Which one?

Both hold messages. Both are managed. One costs a fraction of the other and is already deployed.

### 2. Most people pick by habit

“We always use Service Bus.” That is not an architecture decision, it is a default nobody re-examined.

### 3. Does anyone else need it?

Queue Storage has no topics. One message goes to exactly one consumer, and that is the end of it.

### 4. Does the order matter?

Queue Storage is best-effort FIFO. If “message 2 must not overtake message 1”, you need sessions.

### 5. How big is the message?

64 KB on Queue Storage, 256 KB on Service Bus Standard, 100 MB on Premium — or use a claim check.

### 6. Who catches the failures?

Service Bus dead-letters for you. On Queue Storage that is your code reading DequeueCount.

### 7. How much can pile up?

And here it flips. A Service Bus queue has a ceiling; a Queue Storage queue rides the storage account.

### 8. All no? Use the cheap one

One consumer, order does not matter, small messages, simple retries. That is most background work.

### 9. The whole decision in one frame

Five questions. Four of them send you one way, the fifth sends you the other. Nothing else matters.

### 10. Pick the smallest thing that says yes

Reach for the broker when a question demands it. Until then, the cheap queue is not a compromise.

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## The takeaway

**It depends — but on five specific things**

Ask the questions once and the answer stops being a matter of taste.