Is Service Bus for Windows Server dead

Question

We are currently using it for development, however the last release was Service Bus 1.1 over two years ago.

Should Service Bus for Windows Server be avoided?

Answer 1

Edit: It is officially dead. Microsoft "will not provide an immediate successor for the standalone Service Bus for Windows Server 1.1 product" and it "and will go out of mainstream support on January 9, 2018".

You may want to monitor this Stack Overflow Question (which points to this UserVoice idea) for updates on it being brought to Azure Stack so it can be used on-premise. The latest update from Microsoft was from Sept. 30, 2018 - "Thanks for your feedback. We are pleased to inform you that we are bringing Event Hubs to Azure Stack. We announced Private Preview at Ignite 2018... Service Bus will follow next." As of Dec 2019, Event Hubs is still listed as "IN DEVELOPMENT" on the Azure Stack key capabilities site.

Original answer (Aug 4 '16):

The short answer: Service Bus for Windows Server does have a future as part of Azure Stack but it is not going to be free and will not happen this year (2016).

Apparently the roadmap was announced on May 12 at Integrate 2016 during Clemens Vasters's Service Bus – Roadmap, What’s next? talk. You can listen to the announcements related to Service Bus at about 40:35.

Interesting quotes from the video:

• SB for Windows Server was built for - was primarily motivated by Sharepiont and workflow.
• We [Microsoft] are very surprised by the success of it because we kept it super quiet. It is growing like crazy. We are not going to strand you.
• The Microsoft Azure Stack is the way forward to take the cloud on-premises.
• Service Bus is a better product than any of existing message brokers - even the ones you pay $4 million for.
• It is the only 5-way, parallel load, multi-node broker that you can install locally that does all the fail-over and you can set up and it just works - backed by SQL.
• Service Bus and Event Hubs will be hosted by Azure Stack and run on top of it. But the timeline is not in this year (2016).
• What happens with MSMQ? We are just thinking about that now. We might go and have a version of Service Bus that is shrunk and will also run outside of Azure Stack. So you could run standalone or on-premises private cloud deployment or on the cloud. And the goal is all will be built and supported in a way so that we don't have the situation where we build something and have it sit there for 3 years.
• The entirety of Azure is now committed to that on-premises platform which was not the case for Azure Pack.
• We don't know what the price will be but we will most certainly be cheaper than IBM.
• When we just put up one of the best message brokers in the world as a free download we made a huge mistake. This is because it is hard to commit resources within Microsoft to maintain a free product.

Thanks to user Arunkumar BizTalk360 for pointing us in the right direction in this Microsoft Azure thread

Answer 2

Turns out, it is dead now....

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/collaboration-and-federation-azure-service-bus-messaging-on-premises-futures/

As a consequence, we are announcing today that we will not provide an immediate successor for the standalone Service Bus for Windows Server 1.1 product. Service Bus for Windows Server 1.1 was shipped as a free download that could be installed inside and outside of the Azure Stack precursor Azure Pack. The product is available as a free download and will go out of mainstream support on January 9, 2018, following the regular Microsoft lifecycle policy as published at the initial product release.