Azure Event Hubs

Overview

Azure Event Hubs is a big data streaming platform and event ingestion service. It can receive and process millions of events per second. Data sent to an event hub can be transformed and stored using any real-time analytics provider or batching/storage adapters. Event Hubs provides a unified streaming platform with time retention buffer, decoupling event producers from event consumers.

Real-world Use-case Example

Imagine a scenario where a retail company wants to analyze customer behavior in real-time to optimize their marketing strategies. By using Azure Event Hubs, the company can stream data from various sources such as websites, mobile apps, and in-store sensors. This data can then be processed in real-time to gain insights into customer preferences, enabling the company to tailor their marketing efforts and improve customer engagement.

Best Practices

• Partitioning: Use partitions to achieve high throughput and parallel processing. Each partition can be thought of as a “commit log” and allows for scaling.
• Capture: Enable Event Hubs Capture to automatically move data to Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake for long-term retention and batch processing.
• Security: Use Azure Active Directory (AAD) for authentication and role-based access control (RBAC) to manage access to Event Hubs.
• Monitoring: Utilize Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics to track the performance and health of your Event Hubs.
• Throughput Units: Scale your Event Hubs by adjusting the number of throughput units based on your data ingestion needs.

Pricing

Azure Event Hubs pricing is based on the number of throughput units, ingress events, and egress events. There are two tiers:

• Standard: Suitable for most production workloads, offering features like Capture, Auto-Inflate, and more.
• Dedicated: Provides a single-tenant deployment for customers with the most demanding requirements.

For detailed pricing information, visit the Azure Event Hubs pricing page.

Related Azure Resources

• Azure Stream Analytics: Real-time analytics service designed to process and analyze streaming data from Event Hubs.
• Azure Data Lake Storage: Scalable and secure data lake for high-performance analytics.
• Azure Functions: Serverless compute service that can be triggered by events from Event Hubs.

References

• Microsoft Azure Event Hubs documentation
• Azure Event Hubs service page

Design Pattern

• Pattern: Azure Event Hub