What is the distinction between Windows Azure Service Bus Queues and Windows Azure Queues?

Azure Queues provides the user with a solid, diligent messaging between and within the services. It also highlights quite a straightforward rest-based get/peek/put interface. The Azure Storage Queues make use of the local Azure Storage Emulator and debugging is made quite easy. The tooling for Azure Storage Queues allows you to easily peek at the top 32 messages and if the messages are in XML or JSON, one can visualize their contents directly from Visual Studio. Moreover, these queues can be purged of their contents, which is especially useful during development and QA efforts.

On the other hand, Bus Queues are part of a more far-reaching Windows Azure messaging framework, which supports queuing. As a rule, Azure Service Bus Queues can delete themselves after a configurable amount of idle time. This feature is very practical when you create Queues for each user because if a user hasn’t interacted with a Queue for the past month, it automatically gets clean it up. It is also a great way to reduce costs. However, these Queues are limited to a maximum of 80 GB. Once the user has reached this limit, his or her application will start receiving exceptions.