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Microsoft Azure Event Hubs Pricing & Features: Event Ingestion Service

Posted by Errin O'Connor on Sep, 29, 2021 08:09

Microsoft Azure Event Hubs Pricing & Features: Event Ingestion Service

The contemporary business arena consists of data-centric business processes that require all organizations irrespective of their size and industry, to implement modern data acquiring and analyzing applications. One of the most important parts of data usage in the current industrial sector is in the form of streaming data. The term ‘streaming data’ refers to a continuous data generating process.

This implies that a consistent flow of data is generated from innumerable sources of data which subsequently produce data records in small sizes. The ever-flowing stream of data includes a variety of data consisting of log files related to customer purchases, information from social networking platforms, and others. But, the streaming data cannot be simply acquired and utilized easily. The method of using this data is not complex but a structured process. Once acquired, the streaming data needs to be processed according to a fixed sequence based on records. After the data is processed it is used for a wide range of activities including sampling, filtering, deriving actionable business insights among others.

One of the basic characteristics of streaming data is that a batch of dynamic data is being generated consistently. But on the contrary, the method of processing such ever-evolving data can prove to be very challenging for certain organizations. This has led to the development of several data streaming platforms. The Azure Event Hubs is one such popular platform in the global market.

Azure Event Hub Structure

What is Azure Event Hubs and its uses for organizations:

Azure Events Hub

The Azure Event Hubs is a big data streaming platform that also plays the role of an event ingesting service. The data sent to the event hubs can be processed and stored through the use of real-time analytics applications or similar storage adapters.

Uses of the features under Azure Event Hubs Pricing structure:

The use cases can be categorized in the following way:-

  • Detecting frauds
  • In logging applications
  • Creating analytics pipelines
  • Live dashboarding
  • Archiving data
  • Processing transactions
  • Processing user telemetry
  • Device telemetry streaming

Details About Azure Event Hubs Pricing

Event Hubs can be described as a serverless streaming solution designed by Microsoft for performing real-time data ingestion activities through an easy, secure, and scalable method. The application also enables efficient event streaming from innumerable data sources; so that the user organization can build dynamic data pipelines and cope with business challenges successfully. Along with this the Azure Stream Analytics platform keeps the infested data secure using the disaster recovery and geo-replication features. The features included within the Azure Event Hubs pricing range can be categorized in the following manner:-

Data Pipelines
  • Basic tier cluster
  • Standard tier cluster
  • Premium tier cluster and
  • Dedicated tier cluster
 BasicStandardPremiumDedicated
Throughput unit (1 MB/s ingress throughput, 2 MB/s egress throughput)$0.015/hour$0.03/hourBilled per Premium Unit (PU)Billed per Capacity Unit (CU)
Ingress events$0.028 per million events$0.028 per million eventsIncludedIncluded
Capture $0.10/hourIncludedIncluded
Apache Kafka 
Schema Registry 
Max Retention Period1 day            7 days90 days90 days
Storage Retention84 GB84 GB1 TB per PU10 TB per CU
Extended Retention**  N/A/GB/month (1 TB included per PU$0.12/GB/month (10 TB included per CU)

The Azure Event Hubs Dedicated is priced at $4,999.77 per month per Capacity Unit. The monthly pricing estimates are based on an approximate 730 hours of usage. The Event Hubs for Apache Kafka can aid the user organization to enable the current Kafka clients and applications to interact with the event hub classes without changing codes. This provides an integrated Kafka experience without the hassle of managing separated clusters. The organizations interested in buying the features listed under the Azure Event Hubs pricing range can opt to go through the Azure website, a Microsoft representative, or an Azure partner.

Features available within the Azure Event Hubs Pricing Range:

The features made available under the Pricing range work based on certain specific architectural components. These can be categorized in the following way:-

  • Event producers – This is the term used for all the entities that send data to Event Hubs. The event publishers can publish their events here.
  • Partitions – Each customer has the access to reading only a part or partition of the message stream.
  • Consumer groups – This provides a complete view of the event hub. These consumer model groups allow consumer applications to have separate views of the event streams.
  • Throughout units – These are the pre-purchased units of capacity that control the throughput limit of event hubs.
  • Event receivers – This term is used for any entities that attempt to read events from the event hub.

The beneficial features that are extracted through the above-mentioned components, can be enumerated in the following manner:-

  • Rich and serverless ecosystem The application uses a variety of languages like python, java, NET and others. This ecosystem allows the user organization to seamlessly integrate with several Azure services like the Azure Stream Analytics. Thus, the user company can build seamless architectures.
  • Scalability The Azure Event Hubs Pricing range allows the user company to use the scalability feature of the application until its peak storage size. Along with this the auto inflate feature is one of the unique features available to the user for scaling the number of throughput units required to meet the required organizational needs.
  • Completely managed PaaS The Event Hubs is a completely managed platform as a service that requires very little configuration or overhead management. It is a cloud computing solution that allows the management, configuration and smooth running of the company clusters in the confluent cloud system.
  • Capturing Event dataThe user company can choose to acquire the raw data in real-time in Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake for long term Retention and processing in Azure Active Directory. This can be accomplished in the same stream which is used for performing real-time analytics. This implies that the application can aid in deriving valuable insights.
  • Various tiers in pricing range – The Pricing range consists of a range of pricing tiers that provide several features suitable for all kinds of organizational budgets. For instance, the Event Hubs Premium cluster provides high-end streaming capabilities and hyper-scale capacity with low latency. On the other hand, the Event Hubs Dedicated tier cluster provides a single-tenant deployment format for the user’s organizations that demand high streaming needs. The Event Hubs cluster is capable of ingesting innumerable events per second with a guaranteed capacity and sub-second latency.

Difference between Azure Event Hubs and Azure Service Bus:

Both the Azure Event Hubs and Azure Service Bus are applications built with structural advantages and distinct purposes. The distinct differences between the two applications can be enumerated in the following manner:-

  • Use CasesEvent Hubs is designed to perform Event steaming and Azure Service Bus is focused on being a high value messaging application for various enterprises.
  • Receiving sideThe messages received by the event producers are stored within a single stream. But, the Azure Service Bus gives the users a personal copy of the messages sent by them.
  • Messaging featuresThe Azure Service Bus contains several messaging features like property based routing.
  • Message sessionsThe Azure Service Bus has a concept called message session which is lacking in Azure Event Hubs.
  • Time to live conceptThe Azure Service Bus has a message concept termed as ‘Time to live‘ which provides a definition relating to when a certain message can be moved to the dead letter queue. But this feature is not present in the Azure Event Hubs.

Big data streaming:

The term Big data refers to the large volumes of data that are produced by organizations across the globe in an infinite and continuous process. This implies that the streaming of big data refers to a method of acquiring and processing the data in a simplified way to receive actionable insights. It is one of the most popular big data streaming platforms.

Event ingestion service:

Along with being a big data streaming platform, it is also termed an event ingestion service. This implies that the application is designed to ingest millions of events every second. According to the variation in the Azure Event Hubs Pricing tiers, the ingestion rate and the bi-directional communications differ to a certain extent. The storage of the events is done in disk storage structures where it is later processed to provide the user with the necessary insights.

What is Azure Event Hubs Dedicated

Event hubs clusters provide the user organization with the opportunity to deploy in the single-tenant format. This is beneficial for customers that have high-demanding streaming needs. The single-tenant format is capable of providing 99.99% SLA but this is available only in the dedicated tier cluster. There are certain advantages available with the use of the dedicated tier.

The namespaces and Event Hubs created by the dedicated cluster include within them the features provided in the premium tier. The difference lies in the fact that there is no ingress limit. Along with this, the Event Hubs Capture feature is also provided without charging any additional cost. There are certain crucial benefits of using the dedicated tier cluster of the Event Hubs. These include the following:-

  • Single-tenant deployment
  • Increased performance capacity
  • Inclusive and exclusive access to the features within the Azure Event Hubs Pricing range.

EPC Group Consultation on Azure:

Azure Event Hubs Integration with Power BI Azure Storage and Stream Analytics

The EPC Group is one of the leading organizations that is dedicated to enabling their customers to perform the successful implementation of Microsoft and Azure applications. The company has a group of extremely qualified experts that are Microsoft-certified consultants in terms of Power BI, Azure Stream Analytics, and other Azure applications and products. With tailor-made customized training programs, the EPC Group helps its clients to broaden their organizational capacity and subsequently improve their business credibility.

The successful implementation of Azure applications can help the user companies to improve their productivity and attain the desired organizational goals. The Azure Event Hubs helps the user company to derive the relevant data from the continuous data flow entering the streaming data pipelines and later attain actionable insights. But this process can be often complicated for the user companies to implement without any prior training structure.

Thus, having a dedicated training consultant like the EPC Group for Azure Consulting for Event Hubs, that has more than two decades of consulting experience related to Azure and Dynamics applications and is a Gold certified partner of Microsoft is imperative for ambitious organizations.

Conclusion:

It is one of the most popular data streaming platforms available in the market. The fact that the application is designed by Microsoft in Azure Event Hubs pricing range provides the assurance of the world-class customer support for which the company is popular. Along with this the features provided within the application helps the user to perform big data analytics with ease in addition to attaining valuable insights from the ingested data in real-time. Thus, the Azure Event Hubs is the ideal application for organizations looking for a data streaming platform adept with the necessary features and high scalability

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Errin O'Connor
About the Author

Errin O'Connor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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