Azure Storage Queues & Azure Web Jobs: the perfect combo for background task processing
Experience teaches expensive tasks shouldn’t be resolved real time. Sometime this is because your heavy tasks may need a separate group of compute nodes (and typically you use Azure Batch), but other times you just need to unload your application from repetitive or long tasks, such as reporting and monitoring.
For this kind of scenarios Azure Web Jobs is the best solution I know. You can deploy your Web Job in the same App Plan your PaaS application is running, which means you are going to share the same resources — and your are not charged for extra resources.
When you unload your application from a job you need a queue to trigger the task you decoupled. The easier way to achieve this result is with Azure Storage Queues — a very simple queue that needs just a Storage Account to work.
Understanding Azure Web Jobs
On Azure you can have Continuous and Triggered background tasks. Triggered background tasks are executed on a time basis using a CRON expression, while continuous jobs run in an endless loop. Continuous jobs can be treated almost as functions (you can have triggers, so that you don’t need any connector).