Azure Event Hubs Overview

What is Azure Event Hubs?

Azure Event Hubs is a big data streaming platform and event ingestion service. It can be used to process streaming data in real time. Event Hubs is composed of three distinct components:

Event Hubs: The central message bus.
Event Hubs Capture: A feature that enables you to automatically capture the output of Event Hubs into the storage solution of your choice.
Apache Kafka on Event Hubs: A managed Kafka endpoint for your Event Hubs namespace.

Event Hubs provides a distributed, partitioned, and multi-protocol ingestor that enables you to efficiently ingest millions of events per second from numerous sources.

Key Concepts

Events

An event is the smallest unit of information that Event Hubs can process. It's typically a UTF-8 encoded string or a binary blob.

Producers

Applications or devices that send events to an Event Hub.

Consumers

Applications that read events from an Event Hub. Consumers can operate independently and at their own pace.

Partitions

Event Hubs organizes events into partitions. This allows for parallel processing and scalability. Events with the same key are sent to the same partition.

Consumer Groups

A consumer group allows multiple applications or services to read from an Event Hub independently, without interfering with each other.

Throughput Units (TUs)

The unit of throughput provisioning for Event Hubs. You can scale your Event Hubs capacity by adjusting the number of TUs.

Use Cases

Azure Event Hubs is ideal for a wide range of scenarios, including:

Telemetry streaming from connected devices (IoT).
Log aggregation from distributed applications.
Real-time analytics and processing.
Event sourcing for applications.
Data ingestion for data lakes and data warehouses.

Getting Started

To start using Azure Event Hubs, you'll need an Azure subscription. You can then:

Create an Event Hubs namespace in the Azure portal.
Create an Event Hub within the namespace.
Configure access policies and connection strings.
Use an SDK (e.g., .NET, Java, Python, Node.js) or the Kafka API to send and receive events.

You can find detailed quickstarts and tutorials in the official Azure documentation.

Example of sending an event using a hypothetical SDK:

// Initialize Event Hub client
var client = new EventHubClient("YOUR_EVENTHUB_CONNECTION_STRING");

// Create an event data object
var eventData = new EventData(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("Hello, Event Hubs!"));

// Send the event
client.SendAsync(eventData).Wait();