Azure Event Hubs is a fully managed, multi-protocol, real-time data ingestion service that is designed to serve demanding big data streaming and event ingestion needs.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Azure Event Hubs Premium, a new product SKU that comes with a state-of-the-art event streaming architecture for high-end event streaming scenarios which require elastic, superior, and predictable performance. 

Ever since we first released the preview of Event Hubs Premium, we’ve witnessed incredible excitement and adoption of Event Hubs Premium from our customers and partners. With the help of their feedback, we have improved it to serve your mission-critical production workloads and is now generally available.  

Azure Event Hubs Premium

Event Hubs Premium provides superior performance and better isolation with in a managed multitenant PaaS environment. It comes with reserved compute, memory, and storage resources, which increases the performance and minimizes cross-tenant interference in a managed multi-tenant PaaS environment.

The resources in Premium SKU are isolated at the CPU and memory level, so that each tenant workload runs in isolation. This resource container is called a Processing Unit (PU). You can purchase 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 Processing Units for each Event Hubs Premium namespaces. Therefore, no throttling limits are applied for your data streaming scenarios, and you can stream events up to the maximum level that the allocated processing units can handle. How much you can ingest and stream with a Processing Unit depends on numerous factors such as the number of producers and consumers, the rate at which you're ingesting and processing, and other possible aspects of your workload.

One Processing Unit can approximately offer core capacity of ~5-10 MB/s ingress and ~10-20 MB/s egress, when you optimize the event distribution with sufficient partitions.

Event Hubs Premium introduces a brand-new, two-tier, native-code log storage engine that provides far more predictable and much lower ingestion and end-to-end latencies without any durability compromises. This enables you to ingest and processes large volumes of events and data with high throughput, low latency, and high reliability.  

Event Hubs Premium supports availability zones (AZs) even with one Processing Unit.  Events are triple replicated across AZs while maintaining the low end to end latency. So, if a Premium Event Hubs namespace has been created with availability zones enabled, the outage risk is further spread across three physically separated facilities.

When to use Event Hubs Premium?

Azure Event Hubs Premium SKU is ideal for streaming use cases that require high throughput, low latency, better isolation, and predictability than Standard SKU, while your workloads do not require the full power of a single tenant cluster of the Dedicated SKU.

Premium vs Standard

If you currently use the Standard SKU and your data streaming use cases need high number of Throughput Units (TU) with better performance, then EventHub Premium can offer you some key benefits.

High throughput and low latency

With the new 2-tier storage engine of Event Hubs Premium SKU, you get reduced overall latency and latency jitter without compromising the durability guarantees.

Also, unlike Standard SKU, Premium does not enforce throttling limits on the number of events or the data ingestion rate for a given Processing Unit. So, you can fully utilize the reserved capacity that comes with each Processing Unit.

Predictability and minimal cross-tenant interference

As Premium comes with the isolated compute and memory capacity, compared to Standard, you get minimal cross tenant interference (“noisy neighbor” impact risk) in a multi-tenant PaaS environment.

Generous quotas and premium features

In comparison to Standard SKU, Premium offers generous quotas and comes with some features such as Customer Managed Keys, dynamic partition scaleup etc. that was previously only available in Dedicated SKU. Also features such as event capturing are included with Premium without any additional cost.

Premium vs Dedicated

If your event streaming use case does not need the full power of a dedicated single tenant cluster, compared to the Dedicated SKU, Event Hubs Premium can provide several benefits.

Rapid autoscaling

Unlike dedicated clusters, you can dynamically scale up the Processing Units of Premium namespaces based on your workload.

Availability Zone support without needing additional scaling units

With dedicated it requires to have at least 8 Capacity Units (CUs) to support availability zones. However, with Premium you get availability zone support with just one Processing Unit.

Cost efficient for certain workloads

Events Hubs Premium can bring you cost savings for certain use cases (e.g., workloads of ingestion throughput between 40 MB/s and 150 MB/s) where you don’t need the power of a single tenant dedicated Event Hubs cluster, but you need to handle data streaming workloads that are beyond the limits of the standard tier.

For more details on the different product SKUs and allocated quotas and features, please refer Event Hubs pricing tier comparison.

Get Started Today

To try out and learn more about Azure Event Hubs Premium GA check out the below links.

• You can start using Event Hubs Premium via Azure portal. 
• Want to learn more? Check out Event Hubs Premium Overview.