Azure Functions vs ZeroMQ

Overview

ZeroMQ

Stacks258

Followers586

Votes71

GitHub Stars10.6K

Forks2.5K

Azure Functions

Stacks785

Followers705

Votes62

Azure Functions vs ZeroMQ: What are the differences?

Azure Functions: Listen and react to events across your stack. Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems; ZeroMQ: Fast, lightweight messaging library that allows you to design complex communication system without much effort. The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

Azure Functions belongs to "Serverless / Task Processing" category of the tech stack, while ZeroMQ can be primarily classified under "Message Queue".

Some of the features offered by Azure Functions are:

Easily schedule event-driven tasks across services
Expose Functions as HTTP API endpoints
Scale Functions based on customer demand

On the other hand, ZeroMQ provides the following key features:

Connect your code in any language, on any platform.
Carries messages across inproc, IPC, TCP, TPIC, multicast.
Smart patterns like pub-sub, push-pull, and router-dealer.

"Pay only when invoked" is the top reason why over 7 developers like Azure Functions, while over 17 developers mention "Fast" as the leading cause for choosing ZeroMQ.

ZeroMQ is an open source tool with 5.34K GitHub stars and 1.57K GitHub forks. Here's a link to ZeroMQ's open source repository on GitHub.

Property With Potential, OneWire, and Veris are some of the popular companies that use Azure Functions, whereas ZeroMQ is used by Binary.com, GrowSumo, and indico. Azure Functions has a broader approval, being mentioned in 30 company stacks & 22 developers stacks; compared to ZeroMQ, which is listed in 35 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.

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Advice on ZeroMQ, Azure Functions

Meili

Software engineer at Digital Science

Sep 24, 2020

Needs adviceon

ZeroMQ

RabbitMQ

Amazon SQS

Hi, we are in a ZMQ set up in a push/pull pattern, and we currently start to have more traffic and cases that the service is unavailable or stuck. We want to:

Not loose messages in services outages
Safely restart service without losing messages (@{ZeroMQ}|tool:1064| seems to need to close the socket in the receiver before restart manually)

Do you have experience with this setup with ZeroMQ? Would you suggest RabbitMQ or Amazon SQS (we are in AWS setup) instead? Something else?

Thank you for your time

500k views500k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

ZeroMQ	Azure Functions
The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.	Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.
Connect your code in any language, on any platform.;Carries messages across inproc, IPC, TCP, TPIC, multicast.;Smart patterns like pub-sub, push-pull, and router-dealer.;High-speed asynchronous I/O engines, in a tiny library.;Backed by a large and active open source community.;Supports every modern language and platform.;Build any architecture: centralized, distributed, small, or large.;Free software with full commercial support.	Easily schedule event-driven tasks across services;Expose Functions as HTTP API endpoints;Scale Functions based on customer demand;Develop how you want, using a browser-based UI or existing tools;Get continuous deployment, remote debugging, and authentication out of the box
Statistics
GitHub Stars 10.6K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 2.5K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 258	Stacks 785
Followers 586	Followers 705
Votes 71	Votes 62
Pros & Cons
Pros 23 Fast 20 Lightweight 11 Transport agnostic 7 No broker required 4 Low latency Cons 5 No message durability 3 Not a very reliable system - message delivery wise 1 M x N problem with M producers and N consumers	Pros 14 Pay only when invoked 11 Great developer experience for C# 9 Multiple languages supported 7 Great debugging support 5 Can be used as lightweight https service Cons 1 Not suited for long-running applications 1 Sporadic server & language runtime issues 1 Poor support for Linux environments 1 No persistent (writable) file system available
Integrations
No integrations available	Azure DevOps Java Bitbucket Node.js Microsoft Azure GitHub Visual Studio Code JavaScript Azure Cosmos DB C#

What are some alternatives to ZeroMQ, Azure Functions?

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

Apache NiFi

An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Google Cloud Run

A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management.

Gearman

Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

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