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What is Azure Queue Storage?

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Azure Queue Storage is a service for storing large numbers of messages. You access messages from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. A queue message can be up to 64 KB in size. A queue may contain millions of messages, up to the total capacity limit of a storage account. Queues are commonly used to create a backlog of work to process asynchronously, like in the Web-Queue-Worker architectural style.

Queue Storage concepts

Queue Storage contains the following components:

Diagram showing the relationship between a storage account, queues, and messages.

  • URL format: Queues are addressable using the following URL format:

    https://<storage account>.queue.core.windows.net/<queue>

    The following URL addresses a queue in the diagram:

    https://myaccount.queue.core.windows.net/images-to-download

  • Storage account: All access to Azure Storage is done through a storage account. For information about storage account capacity, see Scalability and performance targets for standard storage accounts.

  • Queue: A queue contains a set of messages. The queue name must be all lowercase. For information on naming queues, see Naming queues and metadata.

  • Message: A message, in any format, of up to 64 KB. Before version 2017-07-29, the maximum time-to-live allowed is seven days. For version 2017-07-29 or later, the maximum time-to-live can be any positive number, or -1 indicating that the message doesn't expire. If this parameter is omitted, the default time-to-live is seven days.

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