A guide on Azure Serverless Computing: Event Grid

June 23, 2022

Prabhu Perumal Renita Joan

A guide on Azure Serverless Computing: Event Grid

Azure Event Grid provides serverless infrastructure for event-based applications. It allows for uniform event consumption using a publish-subscribe model, enabling a reaction to relevant events across Azure and non-Azure services in a near-real-time fashion. Event Grid can send messages from any source and consume the same from any other platform. It has built-in support for events from services like blob storage, service bus, Redis cache, etc. It also has support for custom events using custom topics.  

The Azure Event Grid, a single service for organizing and routing all events from any source to any destination, has several key features, including the ones listed here, 

Simplicity – Send events from Azure resources to any event handlers  

Advanced filtering – Filtering allows only the relevant handlers to receive the events  

Fan-out – Same event can be sent to as many places as needed  

Reliability – 24-Hour retry makes sure events are delivered  

Built-in Events – Support for various resource-defined built-in events  

Custom Events – Write custom events and use the Event Grid to send them out  

Pay-per-event – Like other serverless computing models, pay only for what you use  

What can I do with the Event Grid?  

Here is a list of what can be performed with Event Grid  

  1. Trigger a function app that loads data into Azure SQL when a new CSV file is added to blob storage.  
  2. Trigger a Logic app based on a custom event generated from the application.  
  3. Process a message from the service bus queue and post it into another service bus queue.  

 Let’s now deep dive into the Azure Event Grid’s working model, its various processes, and its pricing. 

How do Event Grids work?  

It can connect to any applications we create, and the Events generated by the application can be pulled and published to different / other destinations. It uses a publish-subscribe model for sending and receiving events. There can be one or many sources from which the Event Grid receives messages similarly and publishes them to one or more handlers based on the filter rules.  

How do Event Grids work? 

How event grids work

Here is a brief outlook on the various sub-processes of the Event Grid: 

 Events  

An event is a piece of data or information that moves through the Azure Event Grid and describes what happened in a system. Most of the time, an Event is given to show that something has happened or changed. All events have three things in common: a source, a time when the event occurred, and a unique identifier. 

 Event Sources  

The event source is the place where the event took place. For instance, it can be an in-built azure event or a custom event from any user application. The following are the Azure services that support sending events to the Event Grid.  

Event Sources 

Event sources  

Topics  

It is the endpoint where publishers send events; it is a restful endpoint where you can send the custom events you are building, which require events support.  

Event Subscriptions  

Whenever an event comes into a Topic, you can subscribe and handle those event applications called subscriptions. Handlers also use it to filter the incoming events intelligently. 

Event Handlers  

Handlers are the applications that handle the events that are coming from subscriptions. The following Azure services support handling events from the Event Grid,  

  • Azure automation
  • Azure functions
  • Event Hubs
  • Logic apps
  • Service Bus
  • Queue storage
  • Webhooks  

Pricing  

Meter  Price  Free Grant (per month)  
Total Operations  $0.60 per million operations  100,000 operations  

 Pricing example  

Published Events (64 KB of data)  5 million operations  
Delivery attempts  5 million operations  
Monthly free grant  100000 operations  
Total operations  9.9 million x $0.60 (price per million)  
Total monthly cost  $5.94  

Event Grid Limits  

Resource  Limit  
Custom topics per Azure subscription  100  
Event subscriptions per topic  500  
Publish rate for a custom or a partner topic (ingress)  5,000 events/sec or 5 MB/sec (whichever is met first)  
Event size  1 MB  
Number of incoming events per batch  5,000  
Private endpoint connections per topic  64  
IP Firewall rules per topic  16  

But comparatively, the pros outweigh the cons making Azure Event Grid an efficient tool for organizing events. 

Azure Event Grid is a fully functional event-routing solution that runs on the Azure Service Platform. It can keep track of all of your events in one place. It was also designed to handle colossal size with ease. Eleviant integrates customizable Event Grid features to manage your events from anywhere and anytime. Get in touch with our experts to know more about cloud and how Azure Event Grid can simplify your event-based applications. 

Disclaimer: All the images used in this series of blogs are sourced from the official Microsoft™ Azure Serverless computing charts and pictography. 

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