What is Azure Event Hubs?
Azure Event Hubs is a big data streaming platform and event-ingestion service. It can be used for real-time analytics, disaster recovery, and online machine learning applications. Event Hubs handles, in a highly scalable manner, any event stream—from simple web page clicks to the most sophisticated scientific data.
Event Hubs is designed for
Ingesting millions of events per second, processing them in near real-time, and making them available for downstream analysis.
Key Features
- Scalability: Event Hubs can scale to handle millions of events per second, making it suitable for the most demanding applications.
- Durability: Events are durably stored and can be replayed, ensuring no data loss.
- Low Latency: Provides near real-time processing capabilities.
- Partitioning: Events are organized into partitions, allowing for parallel processing and high throughput.
- Consumer Groups: Multiple applications can consume the same event stream independently by using consumer groups.
- Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other Azure services like Stream Analytics, Azure Functions, and Azure Databricks.
Common Use Cases
Event Hubs is a powerful tool for a variety of scenarios, including:
- Telemetry from Connected Devices: Ingesting data from IoT devices, sensors, and mobile applications.
- Application Logging: Centralizing logs from distributed applications for analysis and monitoring.
- Real-time Analytics: Processing live data streams for immediate insights and decision-making.
- Fraud Detection: Analyzing transaction streams in real-time to identify and prevent fraudulent activities.
- Stream Processing Pipelines: Acting as a buffer and message broker in complex data pipelines.
Architecture Overview
An Event Hubs namespace is a management container for Event Hubs instances. A single namespace can contain multiple event hubs. Events are sent to an event hub and stored in it. Events are consumed from an event hub by one or more consumer groups.
Getting Started
To get started with Azure Event Hubs:
- Create an Event Hubs Namespace: Use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or ARM templates to create a new Event Hubs namespace.
- Create an Event Hub: Within your namespace, create one or more event hubs to ingest your data.
- Send Events: Use the Event Hubs SDKs (available for .NET, Java, Python, Go, and JavaScript) or the AMQP protocol to send events to your event hub.
- Consume Events: Create consumer groups and use the SDKs or the Event Hubs Capture feature to read events for processing.
For detailed instructions, refer to the official Azure Event Hubs documentation and quickstart guides.