What is Azure Event Hub?

1. Pre-requisite Knowledge –

Before we start with the understanding of what is Microsoft Azure event Hub, we should know –

1. Basic knowledge of cloud computing and its services
2. Basic knowledge of Microsoft Azure
3. Basic knowledge of Bigdata

2. Introduction of Microsoft Azure Event Hub –

Data very import asset for every organization. Nowadays in digital world data volume is growing very fast. Organizations want to use this data for further analytics, to decide the next data-driven business strategies in the fastest way. It would be challenging to process and respond to these Bigdata and events in real-time. So here is the solution by Microsoft – Azure event hub.

Azure Event Hubs is a Big Data streaming platform and event ingestion service, capable of receiving and processing millions of events per second with high security and global scale. It is a massively scalable distributed streaming platform that provides multiple producers and consumers, connecting data streams. We can also call Azure Event Hub as ‘event injector’. Event hubs have very low latency since has the capability of handling large distributed streaming capacity in seconds. The best example of it is streaming the video in IoT and capture the frames of video for further analytics and decisions.

Event Hubs are coming under Platform as a Service (PaaS) in Azure. This is fully managed with a little bit more configuration inside Azure. It is basically designed to handle large-scale, real-time stream ingestion.

To use the Azure Event Hub, we should know the following terms –

1. 1. Event Data – Messages are referred to as event data in this context of the Azure event hub.
   2. Event producer – An entity that sends the messages (events) to the Event hub is known as Event producer or publisher.
   3. Partitions – Its separation/categorization of events in certain groups like a queue, topics, etc. Each partition has a partition key/id.
   4. Consumer Groups – it is view extracted from the entire event hub. Consumer groups enable consuming applications to each have a separate view of the event stream.
   5. Throughput Units – It is a unit of the capacity to handle the traffic coming and out through the event hub.
   6. Event Receivers – An entity that receives/read the event data from the event hub is known as an event receiver.

Image Source- Microsoft Docs

Below are the use cases where we can use the Azure event hub-

• Anomaly detection (fraud/outliers)
• Application logging
• Analytics pipelines, such as clickstreams
• Live dashboarding
• Archiving data
• Transaction processing
• User telemetry processing
• Device telemetry streaming

3. Tangible benefits of Azure Event Hub?

• It can handle the massive amount of data in seconds.
• It has the capability to handle big data with low latency and high security on a global scale.
• IT team has a choice of implementing Azure Event Hub using either Azure web-based portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, ARM template.
• IT team has a choice of frameworks to implement the Azure Event Hub- .NET, JAVA, Python, Nods.js, Apache Storm, etc.
• We can monitor the Event Hub resources using Azure monitor service.
• It is tightly integrated with the other resources in Azure cloud and cross distributed systems.
• It is fully managed PaaS with configuration and management overhead so that we can focus on the business solutions.
• It is highly scalable and supports real-time processing with low latency.
• The billing rate for the Azure event hub is based on a combination of throughput units and ingress events.
• Azure event hub with Apache Kafka will be added advantage for large scale events processing. Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of events a day.

4. Azure Event Hub FAQ

5. Reference Links –

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-about
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-features
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/resources/videos/azure-event-hubs-video/

Conclusion - In this article, we have learned the overview of Microsoft Azure Event Hub Service.