Getting Started with Azure Event Hubs
Learn the fundamentals of Azure Event Hubs, a highly scalable data streaming platform for real-time analytics.
What is Azure Event Hubs?
Azure Event Hubs is a fully managed, real-time data ingestion service that enables you to stream millions of events per second. It's designed for high-throughput, low-latency data scenarios and is a foundational component for many real-time analytics and big data solutions on Azure.
Key capabilities of Azure Event Hubs include:
- High Throughput: Ingest and process millions of events per second.
- Low Latency: Deliver events with minimal delay, crucial for real-time applications.
- Scalability: Dynamically scale throughput units based on your needs.
- Durability: Data is persisted for a configurable retention period.
- Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other Azure services like Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Functions, and Azure Databricks.
Key Components and Concepts
Event Producers
Event producers are applications or devices that send data to Event Hubs. This could be anything from web server logs, IoT sensor data, application telemetry, or financial transactions.
Event Consumers
Event consumers are applications that read event data from Event Hubs. They process the data for various purposes like real-time analytics, data warehousing, or triggering downstream actions.
Event Hub
An Event Hub is the central entity that receives and stores events. You create an Event Hub within an Event Hubs namespace.
Partition
Event Hubs data is organized into partitions. Partitions are ordered, immutable sequences of events. They allow for parallel processing and load balancing of consumers. Events with the same partition key are guaranteed to be in the same partition and in the order they were sent.
Note: The number of partitions is fixed at creation time and determines the maximum parallelism for consumers. You can choose between 1 and 32 partitions for basic tiers, and up to 128 for premium tiers.
Consumer Group
A consumer group is a view of an Event Hub. Each consumer group allows a separate application or service to read from the Event Hub independently. This means multiple applications can consume the same event data without interfering with each other.
Important: When a new consumer group is created, it starts reading events from the beginning of the retention period, unless a specific offset is specified.
Namespace
An Event Hubs namespace is a logical container for your Event Hubs. It provides a unique DNS name for the Event Hubs endpoint and is the administrative boundary for your Event Hubs resources.
Common Use Cases
- Real-time Telemetry: Ingesting data from millions of devices (IoT).
- Log and Metric Collection: Centralizing logs and metrics from distributed applications.
- Real-time Analytics: Feeding data into analytics engines for immediate insights.
- Event Sourcing: Building event-driven architectures.
- Application Integration: Decoupling microservices by using events as communication channels.
Getting Started
To get started with Azure Event Hubs, you'll typically:
- Create an Azure account if you don't have one.
- Create an Event Hubs namespace in the Azure portal.
- Create an Event Hub within the namespace.
- Configure access policies or Shared Access Signatures (SAS) to authorize producers and consumers.
- Develop producer applications to send events.
- Develop consumer applications (or use existing integrations) to read events.
For a hands-on experience, proceed to the Quickstart guide.