Overview of Event Hubs Dedicated

Event Hubs clusters offer single-tenant deployments for customers with the most demanding streaming needs. This single-tenant offering has a guaranteed 99.99% SLA and is available only on our Dedicated pricing tier. An Event Hubs cluster can ingress millions of events per second with guaranteed capacity and subsecond latency. Namespaces and event hubs created within the Dedicated cluster include all features of the premium offering and more, but without any ingress limits. It also includes the popular Event Hubs Capture feature at no additional cost. This feature allows you to automatically batch and log data streams to Azure Storage or Azure Data Lake.

Clusters are provisioned and billed by Capacity Units (CUs), a pre-allocated amount of CPU and memory resources. You can purchase 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16 or 20 CUs for each cluster. How much you can ingest and stream per CU depends on a variety of factors, such as the following ones:

  • Number of producers and consumers
  • Payload shape
  • Egress rate

Note

All Event Hubs clusters are Kafka-enabled by default and support Kafka endpoints that can be used by your existing Kafka based applications. Having Kafka enabled on your cluster does not affect your non-Kafka use cases; there is no option or need to disable Kafka on a cluster.

Why Dedicated?

Dedicated Event Hubs offers three compelling benefits for customers who need enterprise-level capacity:

Single-tenancy guarantees capacity for better performance

A dedicated cluster guarantees capacity at full scale. It can ingress up to gigabytes of streaming data with fully durable storage and subsecond latency to accommodate any burst in traffic.

Inclusive and exclusive access to features

The Dedicated offering includes features like Capture at no additional cost and exclusive access to features like Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). The service also manages load balancing, OS updates, security patches, and partitioning. So, you can spend less time on infrastructure maintenance and more time on building client-side features.

Event Hubs Dedicated quotas and limits

The Event Hubs Dedicated offering is billed at a fixed monthly price, with a minimum of 4 hours of usage. The dedicated tier offers all the features of the premium plan, but with enterprise-scale capacity and limits for customers with demanding workloads.

For more quotas and limits, see Event Hubs quotas and limits

How to onboard

The self-serve experience to create an Event Hubs cluster through the Azure portal is now in Preview. If you have any questions or need help with onboarding to Event Hubs Dedicated, contact the Event Hubs team.

FAQs

What can I achieve with a cluster?

For an Event Hubs cluster, how much you can ingest and stream depends on various factors such as your producers, consumers, the rate at which you're ingesting and processing, and much more.

The following table shows the benchmark results that we achieved during our testing:

Payload shape Receivers Ingress bandwidth Ingress messages Egress bandwidth Egress messages Total TUs TUs per CU
Batches of 100x1KB 2 400 MB/sec 400k messages/sec 800 MB/sec 800k messages/sec 400 TUs 100 TUs
Batches of 10x10KB 2 666 MB/sec 66.6k messages/sec 1.33 GB/sec 133k messages/sec 666 TUs 166 TUs
Batches of 6x32KB 1 1.05 GB/sec 34k messages / sec 1.05 GB/sec 34k messages/sec 1000 TUs 250 TUs

In the testing, the following criteria was used:

  • A dedicated-tier Event Hubs cluster with four capacity units (CUs) was used.
  • The event hub used for ingestion had 200 partitions.
  • The data that was ingested was received by two receiver applications receiving from all partitions.

Can I scale up/down my cluster?

After creation, clusters are billed for a minimum of 4 hours of usage. In the Preview release of the self-serve experience, you can submit a support request to the Event Hubs team under Technical > Quota > Request to Scale Up or Scale Down Dedicated Cluster to scale your cluster up or down. It may take up to 7 days to complete the request to scale down your cluster.

How does Geo-DR work with my cluster?

You can geo-pair a namespace under a Dedicated-tier cluster with another namespace under a Dedicated-tier cluster. We don't encourage pairing a dedicated-tier namespace with a namespace in our standard offering because the throughput limit will be incompatible and result in errors.

Can I migrate my Standard namespaces to belong to a Dedicated-tier cluster?

We don't currently support an automated migration process for migrating your event hubs data from a Standard namespace to a Dedicated one.

Next steps

Contact your Microsoft sales representative or Microsoft Support to get additional details about Event Hubs Dedicated. You can also create a cluster or learn more about Event Hubs pricing tiers by visiting the following links: