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. You can use Event Hubs to process real-time data, such as website clicks, application logs, or sensor data from IoT devices.
What is Event Hubs?
Event Hubs is designed for:
- Big Data Streaming: Ingesting massive amounts of data from diverse sources in real-time.
- Real-time Analytics: Powering applications that need to analyze streaming data as it arrives.
- Event Ingestion: Acting as a central hub for all incoming events before they are routed to various processing engines.
- Decoupling Producers and Consumers: Allowing different parts of your application to produce and consume events independently.
Key Features
- High Throughput: Capable of ingesting millions of events per second.
- Scalability: Automatically scales to meet your data ingestion and processing needs.
- Low Latency: Designed for near real-time event processing.
- Durable Storage: Events are retained for a configurable period, allowing consumers to catch up if they fall behind.
- Partitioning: Events are organized into partitions, enabling parallel processing and load balancing.
- Consumer Groups: Multiple applications or services can read from the same event stream independently by using different consumer groups.
- Geo-Disaster Recovery: Provides disaster recovery capabilities for your event streams.
Important: Event Hubs is optimized for high-volume data streaming and should not be used for traditional messaging scenarios where point-to-point delivery and transactional guarantees are paramount. For those scenarios, consider Azure Service Bus.
Common Use Cases
- IoT Data Ingestion: Collecting telemetry data from millions of devices.
- Application Logging: Aggregating logs from distributed applications.
- Real-time Monitoring: Tracking user activity, system performance, or network traffic.
- Fraud Detection: Analyzing transaction streams for suspicious patterns.
- Clickstream Analysis: Processing user interactions on websites or applications.
Getting Started with Event Hubs
To start using Event Hubs, you'll typically need to:
- Create an Event Hubs namespace in your Azure subscription.
- Create an Event Hub within the namespace.
- Configure access policies (Shared Access Signatures or Azure Active Directory).
- Use Event Hubs SDKs for your chosen programming language to send and receive events.
This guide will walk you through the core concepts, how to send and receive events, and best practices for building robust event-driven applications with Azure Event Hubs.
Explore the following sections to dive deeper: