In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced several new updates to its cloud service Azure Event Grid, ranging from new telemetry events from IoT Hub, to the general availability of advanced filters and Event Domains.
Azure Event Grid has been generally available for over a year, and allows developers to manage events in a unified way within Azure. Since its GA release, it has been further enhanced by the addition of support for Cloud Events in June, and integration with the IoT Hub in September. Furthermore, the team pushed newer updates earlier this year with features around retry policies, dead lettering capabilities, Azure Storage Queues and Hybrid Connections as a destination for events, and a manual validation handshake.
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-grid/overview
One of the new features with the current update is the preview of device telemetry events from IoT Hub. Bahram Banisadr program manager, Event Grid at Microsoft, told InfoQ:
Our teams have been collaborating to bring IoT Hub device telemetry events to life for well over six months, and I couldn’t be more excited to see the creative ways people start leveraging the capability. All of the device data flowing into the IoT Hub is now available to be filtered and pushed to any of our event handlers via Event Grid.
With IoT Hub pushing device telemetry events to Event Grid, developers can create multiple subscribers to trigger, for instance, distinct Azure Functions, Logic Apps or third-party applications to perform unique computation per device type.
Another update to Event Grid is the built-in automatic geo disaster recovery (GeoDR) of metadata, applicable to all existing Domains, Topics and Event Subscriptions. With GeoDR, the service becomes more resilient against service interruption in case of an outage. According to the blog post, in the scenario of an outage that disables an entire Azure region, the Event Grid service will already have all of the customers eventing infrastructure metadata synced to a paired region, and their new events will begin to flow again without any intervention required from the customer, avoiding service interruption automatically.
In relation to GeoDR, Banisadr told InfoQ:
I couldn’t be more proud of the way the Event Grid engineering team pulled off the GA of GeoDR. Every single Event Grid user is now being protected by our automatic failover capability without requiring any changes to their topics or subscriptions.
Furthermore, Event Domains are currently generally available after their introduction together with advanced filtering back in November last year. With Event Domains, customers can organize their entire eventing infrastructure under a single construct, set fine grain authorization rules on each topic for who can subscribe, and manage all event publishing with a single endpoint. Banisadr told InfoQ:
The GA of Event Domains really unlocks the door to creating and running complex multitenant PubSub systems in production. No longer do you need to roll your own bespoke auth systems or track thousands of topic endpoints to manage each of your consumers. Just represent each as a domain topic and assign them roles.
Finally, Microsoft also made advanced filters generally available, allowing developers to route messages in Event Grid using various operators on any part of the event. The GA releases include no restriction on the number of nested objects in the JSON (event), thus offering more granularity when filtering events before passing it to other services.
Azure Event Grid is available in most Azure regions, and pricing details are on the pricing page. Note that there is no cost for metadata GeoDR on Event Grid, as it is included in the current price of the service.
