Is NServiceBus an ESB at all

Question

Is NServiceBus a ESB or lightweight ESB at all? or is it more like WCF with durable/ reliable messaging? It looks to me more like a messaging framework than ESB.

just wa

Answer 1

Well I think nServicebus is certainly a ServiceBus, not sure you can call it an "Enterprise" ServiceBus without spending hundreds of thousands on it. Seriously though, you need to think through whether you really want an ESB or not. Most of them promise a wealth of riches, but deliver a lot of overhead, and it can be very difficult to realize the value. I have used WSO2 in a big enterprise, where it was one of our 3 ESB's. Very enterprisey, run by the OPs team, and a real pain because we had to deal with another team to set up and run our system. Other issues include the so called features like message routing or message translation. Sure the product can do those things but it takes you out of your development environment and gives you more pieces to worry about. Code and or configuration get spread into more places, more things to manage more things that can go wrong. That’s something I do like about nServiceBus it is very accessible to the developer. Another implementation I like is the Azure ServiceBus. Obviously it is not as full featured and it’s probably not what you are looking for, but I love the Developer accessibility and self-service nature, and those are traits I would be looking at.