In today’s digital landscape, managing vast amounts of data in real time is crucial for businesses striving to stay competitive. Azure Event Hub emerges as a powerful solution designed to streamline the ingestion and processing of massive streams of data seamlessly. Let us explore how Azure Event Hub can revolutionize data handling for various applications.
What is Azure Event Hub?
Azure Event Hub is a cloud-based service designed for big data streaming and event ingestion, making it easy to collect and process large volumes of data from various sources.
For Example: Imagine you have a monitoring service that checks your server’s CPU utilization every 5 seconds. You want to send this information to the cloud and store it in a persistent storage like SQL Azure, MongoDB, or Blob storage. Normally, you might write a web service (e.g., ASP.NET WebAPI), deploy it to the cloud, and continuously send messages to this webAPI endpoint. While this might work initially, scaling it to monitor thousands of servers becomes complex and costly over a period of time.
Azure Event Hub simplifies this process. You can provision an Event Hub using the portal, which provides you with endpoints to send your data. You can send messages to these endpoints via HTTPS or AMQP, and the data is automatically stored in the Event Hub. Later, you can read and process this data at your own pace, with the data being retained for a set period automatically.
What is AMQP Protocol?
AMQP is a framing and transfer protocol. Framing means that it provides the structure for binary data streams that flow in either direction of a network connection. The structure provides delineation for distinct blocks of data, called frames, to be exchanged between the connected parties. The transfer capabilities make sure that both communicating parties can establish a shared understanding about when frames shall be transferred, and when transfers shall be considered complete.
The protocol can be used for symmetric peer-to-peer communication, for interaction with message brokers that support queues and publish/subscribe entities, as Azure Service Bus does. It can also be used for interaction with messaging infrastructure where the interaction patterns are different from regular queues, as is the case with Azure Event Hubs. The AMQP 1.0 protocol is designed to be extensible, enabling further specifications to enhance its capabilities.
What Is Azure Event Hub Used For?
Azure Event Hubs are designed for scale, they can process millions and millions of messages in both directions – Inbound and Outbound. Some of the real-world use cases include getting telemetry data from cars, games, applications, and IoT scenarios where millions of devices push data to the cloud.
How Does Event Hub Work?
Event Hubs uses a partitioned consumer model, enabling multiple applications to process the stream concurrently and letting us know the speed of processing. Let us look at the top-level architecture of Azure Event Hub and try to understand the building blocks that make it powerful.
These are some of the important terminologies we need to learn when it comes to Azure Event Hubs:
- Event Data (message)
- Publishers (producers)
- Partitions
- Receivers (consumers)
- Consumer groups
- Event processor host
- Transport protocol
- Throughput units
Event Data: The messages are considered Event data in Event Hub. It contains the body of the event which is a binary stream (you can place any binary content like serialized JSON, XML, etc), a user-defined property bag (name-value pair), and various system metadata about the event like offset in the partition, and its number in the stream sequence. Event Data class is included in the .NET Azure Service Bus client library. It has the same sender model (Brokered Message) used in Service Bus queues and topics at the protocol level.
Publishers: Any entity that sends messages to an Event Hub is called a Publisher. They can publish events using either HTTPS or AMQP protocol. We can publish the events individually or in batches. A single publication whether it is an individual or batched event has a maximum size limit of 256kb and if we publish any event larger than this it will show an error “Quota Exceeded”. The publisher uses a SAS token to identify themselves as Event Hub.
Partitions: It is one of the key differentiations in the way data is stored and retrieved compared to other service bus technologies like Queue and Topics. Event Hubs are designed based on the “Partitioned Consumer Pattern” where data moves parallelly and due to this it achieves high scalability. We can create between 2 to 32 partitions (default 4), however, if required we can create up to 1024 partitions by contacting Azure support.
Consumer: Any entity(application) that reads event data from Event Hub is a consumer. There can be multiple receivers for the same event hub, and they can read the data at their own pace. Consumers connect only via AMQP (whereas on the producer side, we have both HTTPS and AMQP), this is because the events are pushed to the consumer from the event hub via the AMQP channel, the client does not need to pull for data availability.
Consumer Groups: A consumer group is simply a view of the data in the entire event hub. The data in the event hub can only be accessed via the consumer group, you cannot access the partitions directly to fetch the data. When you create an event hub, a default consumer group is also created. Azure also uses consumer groups as a differentiating factor between multiple pricing tiers (on the Basic tier you cannot have more than 1 consumer group, whereas in the Standard tier, you can have up to 20 consumer groups).
Throughput Units: These are the basics of how to scale our Event Hub Traffic while coming in and going out of the Event Hub. It is one of the key pricing parameters purchased at the event hub namespaces level and applies to all the event hubs in each namespace. It handles 1Mb or 1000 events per second on the publishing side and 2Mb/second on the consuming side.
The W’s of Azure Event Hubs: It emphasizes 3 pillar actions “Why”, “When”, and “Where” Azure Event Hubs come into play. There will incorporate the need for an event hub and its necessity in any business application.
Why?
- Azure Event Hubs allows you to raise a data pipeline capable of processing a vast number of events per second with low latency.
- It can process data from parallel sources and connect them to different infrastructures and services.
- It supports repeated replay of stored data.
When?
- To validate many publishers and to save the events in a Blob Storage or Data Lake.
- When you want to get timely insights on the business application.
- To obtain reliable messaging or flexibility for Big Data Applications.
- For seamless integration with data and analytics services to create a big data pipeline.
Where?
- Anomaly Detection
- Application Logging
- Archiving data
- Telemetry processing
- Live Dashboarding
Different Pricing Tier of Azure Event Hub:
The below image shows the different pricing for the services we are using in the Azure Event Hub.
Conclusion
Azure Event Hub stands out as a robust and scalable solution for real-time data ingestion and processing, addressing the complexities and cost implications of traditional methods. By leveraging Azure Event Hub, businesses can efficiently handle vast streams of data, whether from IoT devices, applications, or other telemetry sources.
Key features such as partitioned consumer models, support for various protocols, and flexible scaling options make Azure Event Hub versatile and powerful. Its ability to seamlessly integrate with other Azure services further enhances its utility in creating comprehensive big data pipelines and gaining timely insights.
As organizations continue to navigate the demands of modern data-driven environments, Azure Event Hub provides the necessary infrastructure to ensure efficient, reliable, and scalable data management, paving the way for more informed decision-making and operational efficiency.
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Author: Rahul Kumar