Azure Event Hubs Quickstart

Introduction to Azure Event Hubs

Welcome to the quickstart guide for Azure Event Hubs! This guide will help you get started with understanding and using Event Hubs, a highly scalable data streaming platform and event ingestion service. It can capture millions of events per second so you can build a wide variety of real-time analytics, anomaly detection, and command and control solutions.

What is Azure Event Hubs?

Azure Event Hubs is designed for high-throughput, low-latency data streaming. It acts as a distributed message broker, allowing producers to send events and consumers to read them. Key features include:

• Scalability: Handles millions of events per second.
• Durability: Events are stored and can be replayed.
• Real-time Processing: Enables near real-time data analysis.
• Integration: Seamless integration with other Azure services like Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Functions, and Azure Databricks.

Key Concepts

• Namespace: A logical container for Event Hubs. You can think of it as a unique scope for your event streams.
• Event Hub: A specific data stream within a namespace. It's the actual entity where events are sent.
• Producer: An application that sends events to an Event Hub.
• Consumer: An application that reads events from an Event Hub.
• Consumer Group: A view of an Event Hub that allows multiple applications to independently process the event stream. Each consumer group has its own offset.
• Partition: An Event Hub is divided into partitions. This allows for parallel processing of events and scales throughput. Events with the same partition key are always sent to the same partition.

When to Use Event Hubs

Event Hubs is ideal for scenarios such as:

• Telematics and IoT Data: Ingesting data from millions of devices.
• Application Logging: Centralizing logs from distributed applications.
• Clickstream Data: Capturing user interactions on websites or mobile apps.
• Fraud Detection: Processing financial transactions in real-time.
• Real-time Analytics: Feeding data into analytics platforms for immediate insights.

Getting Started

To begin using Azure Event Hubs, you'll typically need to:

1. Create an Azure Account: If you don't have one, sign up for a free Azure account.
2. Create an Event Hubs Namespace: This can be done through the Azure portal.
3. Create an Event Hub: Within your namespace, create your event stream.
4. Configure Access Policies: Set up shared access signatures (SAS) or Azure Active Directory authentication for producers and consumers.
5. Write Producer and Consumer Applications: Use Azure SDKs for your preferred programming language (e.g., C#, Java, Python, Node.js) to send and receive events.

The next steps in this quickstart will guide you through creating your first Event Hub and sending/receiving messages.

Create an Event Hub