Event Grid

Updated on 22 Feb 2019
2 Minutes to read
Contributors

Print
Comment
Share
Dark
Light
PDF

Article Summary

Share feedback

Thanks for sharing your feedback!

This section will discuss Azure Event Grid.

What is it?

Azure Event Grid is about supporting reliable event delivery at internet scale. With this pattern you can then build reactive event driven applications.

Event Grid is idea for Serverless solutions with their potential for huge dynamic scale.

Features

Event Grid is composed of Event Sources which publish events to the grid, Event Handlers whch process messages.

The messages travel through the grid on topics which allow you to define a subscription to a message which will route it to a handler.

The other key feature of Event Grid is the ability to push events to an endpoint rather than having to get destination to poll for messages. The result of this is the ability to go to higher scale.

Strengths

One of the benefits of Event Grid is that Azure has many out of the box sources and handlers for events allowing you to simply configure bits of Azure to share information to the Event Grid.

Weaknesses

There arent really any weaknesses of Event Grid. The under the hood solution from Microsoft is highly impressive but from a user perspective Event Grid is pretty simple to use and fairly complete.

Dependancies

There are no dependancies for Event Grid beyone an Azure Subscription and resource group.

You can include other things like out of the box source and destinations.

Hosting

There is no hosting requirement. Event Grid is hosted on Azure as PaaS

Costs

The costs for Event Grid are based on a consumption model. You pay per publish and delivery attempt.
The cost is very cheap and you would need to be sending a significant about of messages to get to a high cost.

This section will cover similar technologies

Service Bus Messaging

Both Service Bus Messaging and Event Grid offer a topic and subscription based model for messaging. The key difference is the receiver is a pull model for Service Bus Messaging and Event Grid is a push model.

The use cases for Service Bus Messaging would tend to be transactional command and control messages where as Event Grid would be event notifications.

Event Hub

Event Hub and Event Grid both tend to work with event change notifications but event grid attempts to route and deliver messages asap where as Event Hub has a historical stream of messages which can be read, rewinded and reread.