Azure News - 2026-08-21

Chat is becoming a standard interaction model across customer support, collaboration, gaming, marketplaces, healthcare, financial services, and AI-powered applications. But building a production-ready chat system involves much more than opening a WebSocket connection. Teams also need to manage rooms and membership, deliver and order messages, retain conversation history, recover from connection interruptions, and enforce permissions.

Today, we are excited to announce that Azure Web PubSub chat is available in public preview. Azure Web PubSub chat is a managed capability built on Azure Web PubSub. It provides chat-focused client and server APIs so developers can work directly with familiar concepts such as rooms, messages, members, users, and roles, while Azure manages the underlying real-time messaging infrastructure.

Focus on the chat experience, not the messaging plumbing

Azure Web PubSub already helps developers build large-scale, real-time applications. The new chat capability adds a higher-level abstraction for applications whose primary interaction model is conversation. Instead of defining custom events, message schemas, membership logic, persistence workflows, and reconnect behavior, developers can use built-in chat operations to:

• Create one-to-one or group rooms.
• Add and remove room members.
• Send ordered messages in real time.
• Retrieve persistent room message history.
• Apply built-in or custom roles and permissions.
• Reconnect clients and recover messages after temporary connection loss.

These capabilities run on Azure Web PubSub infrastructure and inherit its automatic scaling, geo-replication, security, and compliance foundations.

Chat-native APIs for clients and servers

Azure Web PubSub chat provides two complementary ways to build.

The JavaScript client SDK, available through the `@azure/web-pubsub-chat-client` npm package, connects applications to a chat hub. Clients can create rooms, exchange messages, load history, manage members, and subscribe to chat events.

The Chat REST API supports trusted server-side and administrative workflows, including managing rooms, users, members, messages, roles, and permissions. This separation lets client applications deliver responsive real-time experiences while backend services retain control over identity, moderation, governance, and business rules.

For example, after connecting a `ChatClient`, creating a room and sending a message takes only a few calls:

Applications can also read message history through an asynchronous iterator, making it straightforward to implement initial conversation loading or incremental history as a user scrolls.

Keep chat data in your Azure Storage account

Persistent chat data remains in an Azure Storage account selected by the application owner. Azure Web PubSub chat uses the Web PubSub resource's managed identity to access that storage, avoiding storage connection strings or keys in the chat configuration.

The stored data includes:

• Messages and conversation history
• Rooms and room membership
• Users
• Roles and permissions

Your data stays in your storage account, and the service keeps no separate copy. This model gives organizations direct ownership of their persisted chat data while the managed service handles real-time delivery and chat operations.

Built-in access control with room-level flexibility

Chat applications often need different privileges for participants, moderators, room owners, support agents, or automated services. Azure Web PubSub chat includes a role and permission model for these scenarios.

Built-in room roles distinguish between members and operators. Both can send messages, read history, and invite members by default, while operators can also remove users. Developers can define custom user or room roles when an application needs a different permission set. Role administration is performed through the Chat REST API, keeping permission management in trusted server-side code.

Reliable conversations across connections and devices

Users expect chat to continue working when a laptop changes networks, a mobile connection briefly drops, or the same account is open in multiple browser tabs or devices. Azure Web PubSub chat runs on Azure Web PubSub's reliable WebSocket connection. The client reconnects and recovers automatically after an interruption, while the service fans messages out to a user's active connections. Persistent history also allows users to load earlier messages after reconnecting or joining a room later.

Choose the right Web PubSub capability

The new chat capability complements the existing standard Web PubSub hub. Use a chat hub when the application is centered on conversations and benefits from built-in rooms, membership, history, roles, and chat-focused APIs. Use a standard hub when the application needs full control over its protocol or supports a different real-time workload, such as telemetry, device signaling, multiplayer state, notifications, or live dashboards. Both options use Azure Web PubSub, allowing teams to select the abstraction that best fits each real-time scenario.

Get started

To try Azure Web PubSub chat:

1. Create or open an Azure Web PubSub resource.
2. Link an Azure Storage account under Persistent Storages.
3. Add a Chat Hub and associate it with that storage.
4. Generate a client access URL for testing.
5. Install the JavaScript client SDK:

6. Connect a client, create a room, and send your first message.

The portal-generated client URL is intended for experimentation. In production, issue client access URLs from an authenticated backend and derive the chat user ID from the signed-in application identity. Managed identity and Microsoft Entra ID can be used for keyless server authentication. 

Azure Web PubSub chat is available now in public preview. Start with the Azure Web PubSub chat overview, follow the quickstart, or explore the client SDK and REST API. We look forward to seeing the customer conversations, collaboration experiences, and AI-powered applications you build with it.