What does MassTransit offer on top of Azure Service Bus?

Question

I'm trying to determine whether I need too use MassTransit on top of Azure Service Bus or just use ASB directly. I'm not planning on using the advanced features like saga's or middleware, but need a simple ESB that supports both command and pub/sub style messaging.

The MassTransit documention on selecting a transport is still in development. Looking at the ASB documentation it seems Azure is offering more than just a transport.

I don't have experience using other ESB's so I'm not sure what features I'll be needing exactly.

I'm looking for some guidance on why I should use one or the other. More concrete: what must-have (if any) features does MassTransit offer over just ASB alone?

Answer 1

The documentation article describes what MassTransit adds to (any) transport.

I will paste some bullet points here:

The benefits of using MassTransit over the message transport, as opposed to using the raw transport APIs and building everything from scratch, are shown below. These are just a few, and some are more significant than others. The fact that the hosting of your consumers, handlers, sagas, etc. are all managed consistently with a well documented production ready framework is the biggest advantage.

• Concurrency
• Connection management
• Exception, retries, and poison messages
• Serialization
• Message header and correlation
• Consumer lifecycle management
• Type-based routing
• Rx integration (observables)
• Unit testing made easy (test harness)
• Sagas and routing slip
• Scheduling
• Monitoring performance counters

Essentially, with just a few lines of code, when using MassTransit you can create a distributed system very fast and easy, avoiding diving into the transport mechanics and all the boilerplate code involved, plus you get retries, exception handling, routing, sagas and so on.