Microsoft announced it would provide support for CloudEvents, a new open specification and standard for consistently describing event data. This open standard was created by the Serverless Working Group of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF), who partner with many cloud services and cloud providers.
The support Microsoft will deliver for CloudEvents is through the Event Grid Service, a centrally managed eventing service in Azure enabling users to send and receive events through a publish-subscribe mechanism. Furthermore, the support in Event Grid is at version 0.1 including native support for events adhering to the CloudEvents JSON schema.
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-first-class-support-for-cloudevents-on-azure/
With CloudEvents, enterprises can build reactive solutions to these events raised from other cloud platforms, IoT devices, and SaaS companies. Furthermore, using CloudEvents means that enterprises will not have be locked into a single cloud vendor when building solutions around them.
Source: https://medium.com/@austencollins/introducing-cloudevents-a758c62c76bf
The CloudEvent schema provides enterprises the means for routing and handling events in a standardized manner. Furthermore, it will give them a uniform way of serializing the outer event schema, and simplify traceability and portability across other environments. The outer schema has several mandatory fields like eventType, source, and eventTime, and the inner schema is custom.
{
// CloudEvents metadata data goes here
"eventType": "aws.s3.object.created",
"eventID": "C1234-1234-1234",
"eventTime": "2018-05-08T14:48:09.769Z",
"eventTypeVersion": "1.0",
"source": "/cloudevents-bucket",
"extensions": {},
"contentType": "application/json",
"cloudEventsVersion": "0.1",
// Your custom event data goes here
"data":
{ "s3SchemaVersion": "1.0",
"configurationId": "cd267a38-30df-412e-9e3d-d0f1ca6e2410",
"bucket":
{ "name": "cloudevents",
"ownerIdentity": {},
"arn": "arn:aws:s3:::cloudevents" },
"object":
{ "key": "cross-eyed-cat.jpg",
"size": 444684,
"eTag": "38b01ff161231d7ca0a0eb3f7a88ff815",
"sequencer": "005AEOAJ31A9A3D61490"
}
}
}
Enterprises can leverage Azure Event Grid by pushing their CloudEvents to an Azure Event Grid topic. Moreover, Event Grid can even transform an event adhering CloudEvents schema to an event adhering to the proprietary Event Grid schema or vice versa. Corey Sanders, corporate vice president, Azure, said in the announcement for supporting CloudEvents:
I am excited to announce that you can now publish and consume events using CloudEvents directly on Event Grid. This allows incoming or outgoing events to use the CloudEvent open standard while still making it incredibly easy to use the rest of the Azure serverless platform, including Azure Functions and Logic Apps.
Microsoft is one of the first cloud vendors supporting CloudEvents. The Event Grid Service is available in the US West Central and US Central, and Europe North Azure regions currently support CloudEvents.