Introduction to Azure Event Hubs

Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable data streaming platform and event ingestion service. It can capture, transform, and store millions of events per second.

Event Hubs is designed for scenarios where you need to ingest large volumes of data from numerous sources and make it available for processing by one or more applications. This includes real-time analytics, anomaly detection, log collection, and event-driven architectures.

Key Capabilities

• High Throughput Ingestion: Process millions of events per second with low latency.
• Scalability: Dynamically scale capacity up or down based on your needs.
• Durability: Events are durably stored for a configurable retention period.
• Decoupling: Acts as a buffer between event producers and consumers, allowing them to operate independently.
• Real-time Processing: Integrates seamlessly with Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Functions, and other real-time processing tools.
• Multiple Consumer Groups: Allows multiple applications to read from the same event stream independently.

Common Use Cases

Event Hubs is ideal for a wide range of real-time data scenarios:

• Telemetry: Ingesting telemetry data from millions of devices (IoT, mobile apps).
• Log Collection: Aggregating logs from various applications and services.
• Clickstream Analysis: Capturing and analyzing user clickstream data from websites or applications.
• Transaction Processing: Ingesting high-volume transaction data.
• Application Monitoring: Collecting performance metrics and application events.

How it Works

Event Hubs works by receiving events from event producers and making them available to event consumers. Events are organized into partitions within an event hub. Producers send events to specific partitions, and consumers can read events from one or more partitions.

This partitioned model allows for parallel processing and ensures that the order of events within a partition is preserved.

Producers

Applications or devices that generate and send event data to an Event Hub. Producers can send events to a specific partition or let Event Hubs decide the partition.

Event Hub

A managed event streaming service that acts as a central point for ingesting events.

Partitions

Event Hubs divides the event stream into one or more partitions. Each partition is an ordered, immutable sequence of events. Partitions are the unit of parallelism in Event Hubs.

Consumers

Applications that read event data from an Event Hub. Consumers use consumer groups to read events independently from the same hub.

Learn more about the underlying concepts in the Core Concepts section.