Chain Azure Service Bus queues or topics together using auto-forwarding
domain: learn.microsoft.com · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Confirm the namespace is Standard or Premium tier, since the Basic tier does not support auto-forwarding
Create the destination queue or topic first — the destination entity must already exist at the time you create/configure the source entity with auto-forwarding, or entity creation will fail
On the source queue or subscription, set the ForwardTo (or ForwardDeadLetteredMessagesTo for DLQ forwarding) property to the destination entity's name within the same namespace
Confirm both source and destination are non-session-enabled, since auto-forwarding is not supported for session-enabled queues or subscriptions
Design the forwarding chain to stay within 4 hops total; messages that would exceed a 4-hop forwarding chain are dead-lettered instead of forwarded further
If you need to scale beyond the ~2,000 subscriptions-per-topic limit, consider a second level of topics fed via auto-forwarding to improve overall throughput and fan-out capacity
Known gotchas
Auto-forwarding only works within the same Service Bus namespace — it cannot forward messages across namespaces or regions
Session-enabled queues and subscriptions cannot use auto-forwarding at all — plan session-based ordering and forwarding topologies as mutually exclusive features
Exceeding the 4-hop chain limit doesn't error at configuration time — it results in messages being silently dead-lettered in transit, so validate your forwarding topology's hop count deliberately
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