Microsoft recently announced the public preview of bi-directional communication via MQTT version 5 and MQTT version 3.1.1 protocols for its Azure Event Grid service.
Azure Event Grid is Microsoft’s cloud-based event-routing service that enables customers to create, manage, and route events from various sources to different destinations or subscribers. It allows them to build data pipelines with device data, integrate applications, and build event-driven serverless architectures.
Microsoft has expanded the Event Grid capabilities to enhance system interoperability by introducing support for MQTT v3.1.1 and v5.0 protocols. This allows customers to publish and subscribe to messages for Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. This new support, currently available in public preview, complements the existing support for CloudEvents 1.0.
Ashita Rastogi, a Product Manager at Microsoft, explains in a tech community blog post:
With this public preview release, customers can securely connect MQTT clients to Azure Event Grid, get fine-grained access control to permit pub-sub on hierarchical topics, and route MQTT messages to other Azure services or 3rd party applications via Event Grid subscriptions. Key features supported in this release include MQTT over Websockets, persistent sessions, user properties, message expiry interval, topic aliases, and request-response.
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-grid/overview
In a YouTube Video on the new MQTT broker functionality in Azure Event Grid, George Guirguis, a Product Manager of Azure Messaging at Microsoft, mentioned what users can do with the MQTT messages:
This will enable you to leverage your messages for data analysis storage or visualization, among other use cases.
Furthermore, Microsoft has responded to customer demands for processing events in highly secure environments by introducing additional "pull" capabilities (also in public preview) to the service. Alongside the MQTT support, these capabilities eliminate the need for configuring a public endpoint and provide customers with enhanced control over message consumption rates, volume, and throughput.
Customers can leverage the new capabilities of MQTT support and pull delivery through the introduction of a resource called Event Grid Namespace. This Namespace simplifies resource management and provides an HTTP and an MQTT endpoint. In addition, this release explicitly supports pull delivery for topics within the Namespace resource. Additionally, the Namespace encompasses MQTT-related resources such as clients, certificates, client groups, and permission bindings.
AWS EventBridge and Google Eventarc offer similar capabilities to Azure Event Grid, allowing companies to build event-driven architectures and enable communication and coordination between different components of your applications or services. In addition, they offer other messaging services like AWS SNS, AWS SQS, and Google Pub/Sub.
Clemens Vasters, a Principal Architect of Messaging Services and Standards at Microsoft, commented in a LinkedIn post:
Azure Messaging supports OASIS AMQP 1.0 as its primary messaging protocol across the fleet, we support the open protocol of Apache Kafka, we support HTTP and WebSockets, and we now pick up OASIS MQTT 5.0/3.1.1 with a full implementation. We literally have no proprietary protocol in active use.
Currently, the public preview of the new capabilities of MQTT support and pull delivery is available in East US, Central US, South Central US, West US 2, East Asia, Southeast Asia, North Europe, West Europe, and UAE North Azure regions.
Lastly, Azure Event Grid uses a pay-per-event pricing model; its pricing details are available on the pricing page.