Introduction to 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 so that you can develop applications and services that react to massive amounts of data. Event Hubs is part of Azure’s big data and analytics platform.

What is Event Hubs?

Event Hubs enables you to ingest large volumes of data from multiple sources. It acts as a distributed streaming platform that can be used for:

Real-time analytics: Process incoming data as it arrives to gain immediate insights.
Data processing pipelines: Power complex data ingestion and processing workflows.
High-throughput messaging: Decouple event producers from event consumers in distributed systems.
Log aggregation: Collect logs from various sources for centralized analysis and monitoring.

Key Features

Event Hubs offers a rich set of features designed for modern data streaming scenarios:

Massive Scalability: Effortlessly scale to handle millions of events per second with configurable throughput units (TUs) or processing units (PUs).
Low Latency: Achieve near real-time event processing with minimal delays.
Durable Storage: Event Hubs retains data for a configurable period (up to 7 days by default), allowing consumers to replay events if needed.
Partitioning: Data is distributed across partitions, enabling parallel processing and high availability. Event Hubs ensures that events with the same key are always sent to the same partition.
Multiple Protocols: Supports AMQP, Kafka, and HTTPS protocols for flexible integration.
Geo-disaster Recovery: Built-in capabilities for disaster recovery across Azure regions.
Managed Service: Azure handles the underlying infrastructure, allowing you to focus on your application logic.

            Note: Event Hubs is designed for high-throughput, low-latency event ingestion. For scenarios requiring message queuing with features like complex routing or guaranteed delivery at the message level, consider Azure Service Bus.
        

How Event Hubs Works

The basic workflow of Event Hubs involves:

Event Producers: Applications or services that send event data to an Event Hub. Producers can send data in batches for efficiency.
Event Hub: The central ingestion point where events are received and stored. Events are organized into partitions.
Event Consumers: Applications or services that read event data from an Event Hub. Consumers can read events in parallel from different partitions.

Data is sent to an Event Hub by producers and is made available to consumers. Each partition acts as a distinct message log. Consumers can read from any partition, and multiple consumer groups can independently read from the same Event Hub.

Example Scenario: IoT Data Ingestion

Imagine you have a fleet of IoT devices sending telemetry data. Each device could be an event producer sending data to an Event Hub. Applications processing this data, such as a real-time dashboard or a machine learning model, would act as event consumers, reading from the Event Hub to analyze and act on the incoming data.

This section provides a high-level overview of Azure Event Hubs. In the following sections, we'll explore how to get started with creating an Event Hub, sending events, and consuming them.

Ready to dive deeper? Proceed to the Quickstart guide to set up your first Event Hub.