Azure Event Hubs is a fully managed, cloud-native, real-time data streaming service that enables you to stream millions of events per second from any source to build dynamic data pipelines and immediately respond to business challenges. It sits at the center of all the operational and analytical workflows for Azure’s customers – whether they are large enterprises or scrappy startups, enabling them to leverage their streaming data to enable new workflows, all in real time.

Data availability and service reliability are core tenets of a cloud-native service and today we are excited to announce the public preview of geo-replication for Azure Event Hubs to complete our story. Geo-replication builds on and fortifies our data availability and geo-disaster recovery story, by allowing you to replicate your Event Hubs data payloads across different Azure regions.

With geo-replication, client applications still talk to the primary copy of the namespace, but customers can specify a secondary region, replication consistency (synchronous or asynchronous) and replication lag for the data, and the service takes care of replicating the data between primary and secondary regions. When customers need to change the primary (for planned maintenance or forced failover), they can promote the secondary copy to be the primary and all client requests are then serviced by the new primary, without changing any configuration (connection strings, authentication, etc.) on the client application. The previous primary then becomes demoted to a secondary region, ensuring that both primary and secondary copies are in sync.

Geo-replication is designed to provide you with the following benefits:

High availability: You can ensure that your data is always accessible and durable, even in the event of a regional outage or disruption. You can also reduce the impact of planned maintenance events by switching to the secondary region before the primary region undergoes any updates or changes.
Disaster recovery: You can recover your data quickly and seamlessly in case of a disaster that affects your primary region. You can initiate a failover to the secondary region and resume your data streaming operations with minimal downtime and data loss.
Regional compliance: You can meet the regulatory and compliance requirements of your industry or region by replicating your data to a secondary region that complies with the same or similar standards as your primary region. You can also leverage the geo-redundancy of your data to support your business continuity and resilience plans.

Pricing

The Dedicated tier for Event Hubs is priced per Capacity Unit. With the Geo-Replication feature, customers must provision a dedicated cluster in secondary region, and the pricing is calculated over the total number of CUs provisioned. Additionally, there is a charge for the data transfer between the primary and secondary regions. During the early public preview, this data transfer charge is waived.

Which regions support Azure Event Hubs Geo-replication?

We’re rolling out the geo-replication feature across our entire fleet, but at launch you can get started by creating Event Hubs dedicated clusters in the below regions:

US

Central US EUAP

Europe

Italy North
Spain Central
Norway East

How to get started with Azure Event Hubs Geo-replication?

If you are interested in trying out Azure Event Hubs Geo-replication, please check out the official documentation – Azure Event Hubs Geo-replication documentation.

We hope that you find Azure Event Hubs Geo-replication useful and valuable for your data streaming scenarios. We look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions on how to improve this feature and make it more suitable for your needs.

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