Overview of Azure Event Hubs

Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable data streaming platform and event ingestion service. It can receive and process millions of events per second. Event Hubs is designed for big data streaming scenarios where high throughput and low latency are critical.

This document provides a foundational understanding of Azure Event Hubs, covering its core purpose, key architectural components, and how it fits into a broader data processing ecosystem.

What are Event Hubs?

Event Hubs enables you to capture, transform, and store events and data streams. This capability allows you to unlock insights from your telemetry and operational data. The service is built on the Apache Kafka protocol, ensuring compatibility and offering a robust platform for real-time data processing.

Event Hubs acts as a distributed messaging system that supports message buffering, reliable message delivery, and multiple producers and consumers for a given stream of events.

Key Concepts

To effectively use Event Hubs, it's important to understand its fundamental concepts:

Event Hubs Namespace

A unique scoping container for Event Hubs and other messaging entities. It acts as a top-level resource for managing access and configurations.

Event Hub

The primary entity within a namespace where events are sent and stored. An event hub is essentially a named stream of events.

Partition

Event Hubs organizes streams of events into partitions. Partitions allow Event Hubs to scale horizontally. Events with the same partition key are guaranteed to arrive in the same partition.

Producer

An application or service that sends events to an Event Hub. Producers can send events to specific partitions or let Event Hubs decide which partition to use.

Consumer Group

A view of an Event Hub that allows multiple applications to independently consume from the event stream without interfering with each other. Each consumer group has its own offset.

Consumer

An application or service that reads events from an Event Hub through a consumer group. Consumers typically process events in order within a partition.

Capture

An optional feature that enables Event Hubs to automatically capture the streaming data in an Event Hub and save it to a Microsoft Azure Storage blob container or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account.

Getting Started with Event Hubs

To begin using Azure Event Hubs, you typically follow these steps:

  1. Create an Azure Event Hubs Namespace: This is the first step in the Azure portal.
  2. Create an Event Hub: Within your namespace, you create one or more event hubs to store your event streams.
  3. Configure Access Policies: Define shared access signatures (SAS) or use Azure Active Directory for authentication and authorization.
  4. Develop Producers: Write applications that send event data to your event hub using available SDKs (e.g., .NET, Java, Python, Go).
  5. Develop Consumers: Build applications or services that read data from event hubs. You'll need to specify a consumer group for your applications.

For detailed instructions and code examples, please refer to the official Azure Event Hubs documentation.