Azure Event Hubs: Concepts Overview
Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable data streaming platform and event ingestion service. It can capture millions of events per second so that you can develop applications and services that react to, and are spurred by, these events. Event Hubs is designed for high-throughput, low-latency data ingestion. It serves as the "front door" for an event pipeline, enabling you to ingest a massive amount of event data from multiple sources.
What is Event Hubs?
Event Hubs is a Big Data Streaming Platform and Event Ingestion Service. It allows you to ingest millions of events per second. Event Hubs enables you to process and analyze the massive amounts of data generated by your IoT devices, applications, and services in real-time.
Core Concepts
Understanding the following core concepts is crucial when working with Azure Event Hubs:
Event Producer
An application or service that sends event data to an Event Hub. Producers can be anything from IoT devices sending telemetry data to web applications logging user activity.
Event Consumer
An application or service that reads event data from an Event Hub. Consumers process the events for various purposes, such as analytics, alerting, or further processing.
Event Hub
The central entity in Event Hubs. It acts as a buffer for event data. An Event Hub is organized into partitions.
Partition
A ordered sequence of events. Each partition is an independent stream of events. Event Hubs guarantees that events sent to the same partition are consumed in the order they were received. This ordering is only within a partition, not across the entire Event Hub.
Consumer Group
A view of an Event Hub that allows multiple applications to read from the Event Hub independently without blocking each other. Each consumer group maintains its own offset for reading events.
Offset
A unique identifier for an event within a partition. Consumers use offsets to track their position in the event stream and to resume processing from where they left off.
How it Works
Event producers send events to a specific Event Hub. The Event Hub distributes these events across its partitions. Event consumers, organized into consumer groups, then read these events from the partitions. Each consumer within a consumer group reads events from a subset of the partitions, ensuring that each event is processed only once within that group.
Use Cases
Azure Event Hubs is ideal for a variety of scenarios, including:
- Telematics and IoT: Ingesting massive amounts of data from connected devices.
- Log and Telemetry Streaming: Collecting and processing logs and metrics from applications and infrastructure.
- Real-time Analytics: Powering real-time dashboards and analytical processing.
- Event-Driven Architectures: Acting as a backbone for microservices communication.
- Data Warehousing and Archiving: Ingesting data for batch processing or archival.
Key Benefits
- Scalability: Handles millions of events per second.
- Low Latency: Designed for real-time data ingestion.
- Durability: Data is durably stored for a configurable retention period.
- Decoupling: Separates event producers from event consumers.
- Flexibility: Supports various protocols and integration with other Azure services.
This overview provides a foundational understanding of Azure Event Hubs. For more in-depth information, please refer to the other sections of this documentation.