Azure Event Hubs

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| By Webner

Introduction:

Event Hubs is a real-time data ingestion service that is fully managed, simple, scalable, and trusted. It can stream, process, and receive millions of events per second from any of the sources, which builds data pipelines that are dynamic in nature. These pipelines are favourable to respond to many of the business challenges immediately. Event Hubs even process the data in the time of emergencies using geo-replication and geo disaster recovery techniques. It can integrate with other services from Azure seamlessly that can unlock valuable insights. It also allows the existing clients and applications from Apache Kafka to talk to the hubs without changing any of your code, that is you experience a managed Kafka and do not have to worry about managing clusters on your own. You can get real-time micro batching and data ingestion both on the same stream. The data that is being sent to the hub can be stored as well as transformed with the use of any storage/batching adapter or analytics provider on a real-time basis.
Azure Event Hubs can be used in the scenarios listed below :

  • Data Archiving
  • Detection of anomalies or any kind of fraud
  • Pipeline Analytics
  • Live Dashboarding
  • Processing of Transactions
  • Telemetry Processing for user
  • Telemetry Streaming of devices
  • Logging for Applications

Advantages of Azure Event Hubs:

  • With the help of event hubs, the focus can be solely shifted to the insights from data instead of infrastructure management.
  • With this, you can build data pipelines in response to the challenges of business effectively, efficiently, and reliably.
  • It is simple to build the pipelines in just a matter of mere clicks and can integrate with other services from Azure to process things faster and more efficiently.
  • It is scalable, such that you would pay only for what is being used by you, by dynamically adjusting throughput as per your usage needs.
  • It can ingest data from any of the sources and develop it across different platforms, using popular protocols HTTPS, Apache Kafka, and AMQP.
  • It is secure and protects your real-time data. It is also certified by ISO, GxP, HIPAA, PCI, CSA STAR, SOC, and HITRUST.

Event Hubs acts as the front door for the data pipeline. In the solution architecture, it is even called Event Ingestor as it acts as a component/service which works between event consumers and event publishers. It decouples event stream production from its consumption. It provides processing, streaming with low latency.

Key Features of Azure Event Hubs:

  • It uses a partitioned consumer model which helps to enable multiple applications that can process the data stream simultaneously and gives you the ability to control the processing speed.
  • It also supports the processing of streams with different languages like .NET, Python, Java, JavaScript. The supported languages would provide a low level of integration. It can also integrate with Azure Functions, Azure Stream Analytics, and other services to help you build a serverless architecture.
  • It also captures the data in real-time and stores it for a long term in Azure Data Lake or Azure Blob Storage and can also be used for micro-batch processing. This behavior can also be achieved on the same stream as analytics derivation. It can be set up to capture the event data really fast and efficiently, without any administrative cost. It helps you to focus entirely on the processing of data as it does the whole process to capture the data.
  • It also has an auto-inflate feature, so as to scale the system as per your need, and you only as per your requirement and usage. This is measured in throughput units.
  • It is a fully managed platform as a service or PaaS needing just a little and simple configuration.

The key components of Azure Event Hubs are:

  • Event Producers Event producers consist of any of the entity/sources which sends the data to the hub. The events can be published using any of the simple protocols like Kafka, HTTPS, or AMQP.
  • Partitions Only a specific subset(partition) of the message can be read by the consumers.
  • Consumer Groups A separate view of the stream can be provided to each of the consumer groups. This can be viewed, streamed, or read differently as per the consumer’s convenience. A view is a position, offset, or a state of the entire event hub.
  • Throughput Units These are described as the units of capacity that can be pre-purchased which controls the event hubs throughput capacity.
  • Event Receivers The event can be delivered via a session as it becomes available. Receivers are all the entities that can read this event data from the Azure Event Hub.

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