Unleashing Cloud Potential: Solace’s Breakthrough on Azure Boost-Enabled VMs

Customers in industries like finance, telecommunications, and e-commerce demand messaging solutions that can sustain over a million guaranteed messages per second with exceptionally low latency. Achieving such performance in on-premises environments is challenging enough (often requires purpose-built appliances), but doing so in the cloud presents a whole new set of challenges.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how we fine-tuned PubSub+ Event Broker to push the boundaries of performance on Microsoft Azure Boost-enabled virtual machines. Our journey uncovered critical insights into optimizing network, storage, compute, and configuration to deliver the sustained throughput customers demand — all in a cloud-native setup.

The Challenge: Sustaining Extreme Throughput in the Cloud

High-throughput event messaging in the cloud requires a combination of:

• Sufficient network bandwidth to handle massive data flow.
• Low-latency, high-IOPS storage to support guaranteed delivery.
• Efficient CPU utilization to avoid bottlenecks during intense workloads.

To meet these requirements, we tested Solace PubSub+ Event Broker on Azure Ebdsv5 virtual machines with Azure Boost, a technology that offloads virtualization processes onto specialized software and hardware. Our testing revealed the potential of this configuration to support sustained messaging at scale.

Foundations for Cloud-Native Performance

Our performance exploration focused on optimizing three key components: VMs, disk configuration, and HA architecture.

Virtual Machines

We used the Ebdsv5 series, leveraging Azure Boost to achieve:

• 40,000 Mbps network bandwidth for high throughput.
• 400,000 IOPS and 10,000 MBps disk throughput, enabled by NVMe controllers.

Testing spanned VM sizes from E16bds_v5 (16 vCPUs) to E112ibds_v5 (112 vCPUs).

Disk Configuration

Solace message spool storage requires a high-performance disk to meet guaranteed delivery demands. We tested:

• Premium SSD v2: A cost-effective option with tunable IOPS and throughput.
• Ultra Disks: For extreme performance, configured to 300,000 IOPS/10,000 MBps.

High-Availability Architecture

A Solace PubSub+ redundancy group (active/standby brokers with monitoring, see diagram below) was deployed across three availability zones in Azure’s East US 2 region to ensure resilience.

Testing Methodology

We tested both 1 KB and 1 MB guaranteed delivery messages with a 1:5 fan-out pattern. 40 publishing and 200 subscribing clients were distributed across 40 Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) worker nodes to generate sufficient message load, simulating real-world scenarios. (We grouped the publishers and subscribers together for ease of deployment.)

Results: Breaking Throughput Barriers

The tests showcased the scalability and efficiency of Solace PubSub+ on Azure.
Here’s how different configurations performed:

Key Insights and Optimizations

Compute

• Idle CPU cores: Larger VMs often had idle CPU cores, suggesting limited impact from additional vCPUs.
• Hyperthreading: Enabling/disabling hyperthreading made no measurable difference.

Disk Performance

• A dedicated NVMe data disk for Solace message spool storage was crucial.
• Premium SSD v2 offered the best cost-to-performance ratio, while Ultra disks were more suitable for extreme edge cases.

Network Configuration

• Message throughput scaled with VM network bandwidth, especially for larger messages.
• Cross-zone deployments showed no performance degradation, enabling enhanced resilience without sacrificing throughput.

Solace-Specific Tuning

Adjustments to Solace broker and client settings unlocked higher performance.

• Broker optimizations: Increased max connections and file limits.
• Pub/sub settings: Adjusted window size and acknowledgment thresholds for efficient message flow.

Conclusion: Cloud-Native Scalability with Solace on Azure

With a little fine tuning, we demonstrated how Solace PubSub+ on Azure Boost-enabled VMs delivers exceptional performance for cloud-based event-driven architectures. Whether processing millions of financial transactions or scaling e-commerce platforms during peak seasons, this solution can meet the demands of even the most performance-critical use cases.

Are you ready to unlock high-throughput messaging in the cloud?
Reach out to explore how Solace can power your event-driven system on Azure.