Customers from various industries such as manufacturing, automotive, retail and more, are heavily investing in cloud solutions to harness their data and deliver new experiences for their customers. Meeting these customer expectations requires real-time event-driven architectures and high connectivity between applications and devices. To help create this value, Azure Event Grid has been evolved to deliver pub-sub messaging for Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications at scale.
Today, we are thrilled to announce the General Availability of the MQTT broker capability and pull delivery, as well as the public preview of push delivery in the Event Grid Namespace. With this release, we are also doubling the scale allowed in a single Event Grid namespace, now enabling up to 40 throughput units, to support more data-intensive scenarios. Additionally, a new system topic and event handler are also available in public preview in the Event Grid basic tier.
MQTT broker
To meet the growing demand for connectivity and integration of data between IoT devices and cloud-based services, Azure Event Grid’s new MQTT broker feature is now Generally Available. This enables bi-directional communication between MQTT clients, at scale, over custom hierarchical topics, enabling one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one messaging using MQTT v5 protocol and MQTT v3.1.1 protocol. The routing functionality now allows you to send MQTT messages to namespace topics as well as custom topics available in Event Grid basic tier, to consume MQTT messages via push or pull delivery from Event Grid to services such as Azure Event Hubs, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps or 3rd party services via webhooks. The routing capability also enables integration of your IoT data with Azure Data Explorer and Microsoft Fabric through the Azure Event Hubs handler.
To support automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and mobility providers in development of advanced connected vehicle services through Azure, we have designed automotive messaging and connected fleet reference architectures, which leverage Event Grid’s MQTT broker capability to deliver messaging at scale. To further support development and testing software-defined vehicle (SDV) architectures, we recommend using the SDV toolchain reference which outlines how to leverage software stacks and distributions that Azure and the Eclipse Foundation SDV working group offers.
Azure Event Grid also integrates with Azure IoT Operations, enabled by Azure Arc, to bridge messages between the edge MQTT broker and Event Grid’s cloud MQTT broker. This capability is now available in public preview.
Flexible message consumption via push and pull delivery of events
Business and organizations rely more than ever on real-time data to make informed decisions and drive innovation. To achieve this, solutions require flexibility in running applications that have different architectures, processing speed, scale, and security requirements. To enable event driven architectures in highly secure environments, pull delivery through namespace topics in Event Grid is now Generally Available. This allows customers to control the rate and volume of messages consumed and process events without configuring a public endpoint, while supporting much larger throughput.
With this release, Event Grid namespace now also supports the ability to push events to Azure Event Hubs at high scale through a namespace topic subscription. This is available in public preview and enables the development of more distributed applications to send discrete events to ingestion pipelines.
Through Event Grid namespace topics, applications can consume messages using push or pull delivery on the same set of data, that could be CloudEvents 1.0 format or MQTT message format. Push delivery can be used to forward events to Azure services, or applications that want to avoid polling to determine a system state change. Pull delivery can be used to enable applications that need more control over message consumption or use private links when receiving events.
Greater capacity to meet demand
With the growing demand for high scale, each Namespace now enables connecting to 400,000 MQTT clients with up to 40MB per second or 40,000 MQTT messages per second ingress and egress; and 40MB per second or 40,000 events per second ingress, 80MB per second or 80,000 events per second egress. In the next few months, we will support 1 million MQTT clients with up to 100MB per second or 100,000 MQTT messages per second ingress/egress, and 100MB per second or 100,000 events per second ingress, 200MB per second or 200,000 events per second egress. For a comprehensive list of regions in which these new features are available in Event Grid namespace, see Event Grid overview.
Event Grid basic tier system topics
We now have integrations with more Azure services to support alerting and notifications scenarios.
Event Grid basic tier system topics will now support Azure Monitor alerts as an event handler for Azure Key Vault events, enabling notifications for critical events via Short Message Service (SMS), email, push notification, and more. This is now available in public preview.
We have also added Azure resource notifications (ARN) Health resources system topic in Event Grid basic tier, in public preview. This provides accurate and comprehensive notifications about the health of your Azure resources, such as Virtual Machines (VMs) including single instance VMs, VMs in Virtual Machine Scale Sets, or Virtual Machine Scale Sets, to enable issue discovery and troubleshooting.
Event subscriptions for system/custom/partner topics and domains, available in Event Grid basic tier, will now also support namespace topics as an event handler. This feature is available now in public preview to enable you to forward events to namespace topics to pull events at your own pace.
Next Steps
To learn more and try these new capabilities, get started through the Event Grid Documentation.