Hubs, Sharding and Partitioning

It seems there is a some misunderstanding related to sharding and partitioning when talking about IoT and Microsoft Azure platform. Here is my recommendation about how we should thnk about this.

 

EventHub uses internally  messaging feature called 'partitioning'. To understand how that works I would recommend to read more about this in context of service bus. It basically enables multiple message brokers instead of a single one. So, this is called partitioing even if some people might call this shrading.

 

IotHub also uses same (or similar) technic as EventHub. However, when we talk about IotHub 'shards' we do not think about partitioning on message level. It is rather using of multiple IotHubs inside of same solution. This is not some specific technology under the hub. To use multiple IotHubs inside of a single solution, You should decide how device provisioning is done. Dev1-Hub1, Dev2->Hub2 etc.