Key Features of Azure Event Hubs

High Throughput Streaming

Azure Event Hubs is designed to ingest and process millions of events per second. It provides a distributed, partitioned streaming platform capable of handling massive data volumes from diverse sources.

It acts as a central hub for collecting telemetry, logs, and other event data, enabling real-time analytics and processing.

Partitioning

Event Hubs organizes data into partitions. Each partition is an ordered, immutable sequence of events. This partitioning enables parallel processing, allowing consumers to read from multiple partitions concurrently, which significantly boosts processing throughput.

Events are distributed across partitions based on a partition key, ensuring that events with the same key are always sent to the same partition. This is crucial for maintaining order for specific entities.

Configurable Data Retention

You can configure the duration for which Event Hubs retains event data. This allows you to balance storage costs with the need to reprocess or analyze historical data. Retention periods can range from a minimum of 24 hours to a maximum of 7 days (or up to 365 days for Kafka compatibility).

After the retention period, data is automatically deleted.

Event Replay

Event Hubs supports replaying events. This means that consumers can read events from a specific point in time or offset within a partition, enabling scenarios like re-processing data or recovering from consumer failures.

This feature is particularly useful for debugging and disaster recovery.

Capture Feature

The Event Hubs Capture feature automatically and continuously captures the streaming data from an Event Hub into a specified Azure Blob Storage account or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account.

This provides a cost-effective way to archive event data for batch analytics, machine learning, or compliance requirements.

# Example of enabling capture (conceptual)
az eventhubs event-hubs capture \
    --resource-group myResourceGroup \
    --namespace-name myNamespace \
    --event-hub-name myEventHub \
    --destination-storage-account myStorageAccount \
    --destination-container myContainer \
    --enabled true
                

Geo-Disaster Recovery

Event Hubs offers Geo-Disaster Recovery capabilities. You can set up a primary and secondary namespace and configure automatic or manual failover. This ensures high availability and business continuity in the event of a regional outage.

Robust Security

Event Hubs provides multiple layers of security, including Azure Active Directory integration, Shared Access Signatures (SAS), and managed identities. You can control access to your event hubs and enforce fine-grained permissions.

Integration with Azure Services

Event Hubs integrates seamlessly with a wide range of Azure services, including Azure Functions, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Databricks, and Azure Monitor, allowing you to build powerful end-to-end streaming data solutions.