I have a system where losing messages from Azure Service Bus would be a disaster, that is, the data would be lost forever with no practical means to repair the damage without major disruption.
Would I ever be able to rely on ASB entirely in this situation? (even if it was to go down for hours, it would always come back up with the same messages it was holding when it failed)
If not, what is a good approach for solving this problem where messages are crucial and cannot be lost? Is it common to simply persist the message to a database prior to publishing so that it can be referred to in the event of a disaster?
Azure Service Bus doesn’t lose messages. Once a message is successfully received by the broker, it’s there and doesn’t go anywhere. Where usually things go wrong is with message receiving and processing, which is user custom code. That’s one of the reasons why Service Bus has PeekLock receive mode and dead-lettering based on delivery count.
If you need strong guarantees, don’t reinvent the wheel yourself. Use messaging frameworks that do it for you, such as NServiceBus or MassTransit.