Azure Event Hubs and IoT Hub

Imagine that you are the CEO of a big Logistic & Transport Company that works across the UK. In order to obtain multiple insights that will allow you to efficiently analyse how your company is performing and help you take better decisions, you decide to start collecting different telemetry information from the vehicles fleet. The question is, how will you manage to deal with hundreds of connected devices producing millions of telemetry data? The answer is….

Event Hubs

Back in 2014, Microsoft announced the release of Azure Event Hubs, a service that allows the collection of high throughput ingress of data streams generated by devices and services in an easy, secure and reliable way.

The Event Hubs can be created either through the Azure Portal or the Management API and gets immediately available without the need of further setups or management/maintenance requirements. The information stored in customer partitions will provide the message streaming. Each customer will only read a specific subset of the message stream due to the portioned customer pattern.

IoT Hub

In a very simplistic way, the Azure IoT Hub is the bridge between our devices and the cloud. It is fully manageable, enables reliable and secure device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device communication between millions of IoT devices and provides a service interface to support the application development.

Event Hubs or IoT Hub

If we consider the IoT Hub as an improvement of Event Hubs, shall we assume that the solution to the scenario described on the top of the article will be the first option? The answer is… depends on what we want to achieve.

If our needs require bidirectional communication and millions of simultaneously connected devices, IoT Hub would be the choice, however, combining the IoT Hub and Event Hubs instead of using them separately is a better option. While IoT Hub can deal with the device-to-cloud communication, the Event Hubs can deal with the huge amount of event ingresses produced by our vehicle fleet.

More Info:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-event-hubs-general-availability/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-overview

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/learning-paths/iot-hub/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/resources/videos/azurecon-2015-overview-of-azure-iot-hub/

http://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2017/02/iot-hub-vs-event-hub/