2PC in the cloud is hard for all sorts of reasons. 2PC as implemented by DTC effectively depends on the coordinator and its log and connectivity to the coordinator to be very highly available. It also depends on all parties cooperating on a positive outcome in an expedient fashion. To that end, you need to run DTC in a failover cluster, because it’s the Achilles heel of the whole system and any transaction depends on DTC clearing it.
The bottom line is that Service Bus, specifically with its de-duplication features for sending and with its reliable delivery support using Peek-Lock (which we didn’t discuss in the thread, but see here and also here) is a great tool to compensate for the lack of coordinator support in the cloudThe Azure storage folks implement their clusters in a very particular way to provide highly-scalable, highly-available, and strongly consistent storage – and they are using a quorum based protocol (Paxos) rather than classic atomic TX protocol to reach consensus.
In the current release, only one top level messaging entity, such as a queue or topic can participate in a transaction, and the transaction cannot include any other transaction resource managers, making transactions spanning a messaging entity and a database not possible.
Has Windows Azure any kind of distributed transaction mechanism in order to include any remote object creation in an atomic transaction including other domain-specific operations?