This is the forth part of my advices and feedbacks to the first Beta of known Azure-Services for on-premis installations. You can find the whole series also in the developers.de blog. Service Bus 1.0 (also called Service Bus Server) is a Microsoft messaging product, that many people will compare with Enterprise Service Bus. Currently Microsoft is NOT positioning Service Bus Server as an ESB product. The reason for that is that Service Bus doesn’t support many of the features which are supported by typical ESB. For example, a common service bus supports features like: protocol conversion, message transformation, adapters (in terms of BizTalk), business monitoring etc.
Service Bus is for now a messaging runtime focused on rich messaging patterns like pub-sub & queues. Moreover it guarantees on-prem and cloud symmetry.
To recap, Service Bus is not an ESB product but rather a messaging platform.
An interesting combination of Service Bus Server and Workflow enables however easy implementation of highly scalable workflow based and long running scenarios, which make place for new innovative solutions.
For more information take a look here.