Ever wonder how to manage your events at scale?
Azure Event Grid is the solution
and I'm gonna tell you all about it, coming up now.
Hello everybody, my name is Adam Gordon,
an edutainer here at ITPROTV, back with another exciting
and fun-filled episode in our ‘What is Azure?’ conversation series.
We're continuing to look at different Azure services, features,
and capabilities that are going to be of interest to you
and that you want to know more about.
In this episode, we're going to look at Azure Event Grid,
and as we always do, we'll pose
and answer our three famous questions.
What is Event Grid?
Why would you want to use it?
And of course, how do we roll our sleeves up
and put this thing to work?
Let's jump right in and start talking about
what Event Grid actually is.
On the left-hand side of the lightboard over here
you see that I've documented out and kind of drawn out a column.
It's labeled event sources,
and event sources really just represents all the different events,
events are things that happen, that we want to be able
to understand and ultimately work with
and use Event Grid to help us to work with.
But event sources are the things that actually create those events.
We've got a whole bunch of them,
randomly sampling some of the different event sources
that potentially can be used to interact with Event Grid.
We have Event Grid over here in the middle.
This is obviously going to be very important,
which is why it's sitting between our two columns.
More on that in just a second.
But, over here on the right, we have what's known as event handlers.
Again, we have a sampling of different event handlers.
Event handlers are going to be the things
that receive information about events,
and that can then go execute on that information,
and do something on our behalf.
So, what we're really looking at is things that happen,
elements that are going to take those things that happen
and create some action, and something in the middle
that really becomes central to our conversation
because it has to connect the things that are creating events
to the things that are going to act on those events.
That's what Event Grid really does,
it creates connections for us, taking information,
events create information, and allowing us to transfer that at scale,
globally across the Azure infrastructure,
anywhere across any data center, potentially in the world.
Highly available, it's always there, always-on, and as always,
we pay for only what we need and what we consume.
As a matter of fact, we actually get our first
100,000 event occurrences free, as we use Event Grid
as part of our default, standard, Azure subscription.
So, the first 100,000 events that occur every month
are just gonna flow through this process,
we're not even gonna pay for them.
We like that a lot.
So, when we think about event sources,
we think about things that are happening.
When we want to answer the question, ‘What is Event Grid?’
It really is, at the end of the day, it's either...
you can think of it as a switchboard operator
if you have that point of reference in your mind,
or as I was talking to one of my colleagues here at ITPROTV,
she said to me, ‘Hey, that sounds kind of like a router.
It's moving information from one place and sending it to another.’
You can think of it like that.
Whatever makes the most sense to you,
it is the central element that allows us to take these events
that are occurring, process them, and then send them over
into these various areas that are going to be
taking action on our behalf.
It becomes the central switching station
for all of our information flow.
That's really what Azure Event Grid is all about.
When we think about the ‘why.’
Why would we want to use Event Grid?
Why don't we take all these event sources;
things from Azure resource groups,
our containing elements that have all of our objects in them;
the azure subscription or subscriptions we may have,
the all-up wrapper,
the all-up entity that contains everything that we do,
all the things we've been talking about in our conversations;
other event hubs, other elements that process events
or any of the services and capabilities
that can create event sources,
there are an almost unlimited number of them in Azure.
Why would we want to move all that information
through a central mechanism to process it,
and then send it over to one of these event handlers?
Things that can take input and do something on our behalf.
Perhaps some serverless code
that's running as one or more Azure functions;
Web apps that can provide capabilities;
Workflow and integration that can take this event
and trigger an entire outcome chain, an entire process chain,
somewhere else in the Azure service stack;
Buffering and the ability to be able to consume
additional events through event hubs, a paired companion
with Event Grid that lets us execute on these events
and essentially be able to team them up
for different workflow elements;
and all sorts of other services and applications
that are being fed these events to allow them
to then do their job on our behalf.
The ‘why’, in other words, is really the valuable power of scale here.
It lets us take outcomes
that are occurring somewhere on our system,
consistently and reliably transfer them to inbound receptors;
things that are going to take them on,
and hopefully take action for us on our behalf,
moving that event down the chain and enabling us, at scale,
to not only create the interactions and ultimately create
the outcomes we look for, but to really enable us to utilize, fully,
all the different services and capabilities in the Azure platform.
Many of which we've already talked about in our conversations,
and of course, many more that will be upcoming
as we continue looking at different Azure services.
So, when we think about the ‘why’, really think
about event management and event communication at scale.
Highly available, highly scalable, globally, from anywhere
to anywhere, across our Azure infrastructure.
Now, as we step back and we think about the ‘why’
and the ‘what’, it always takes us towards the ‘how’.
When we think about the ‘how,’ as we always do,
we will go in and normally take a look
at how to implement one of these services.
Showing you, at least on the surface
at a high level, what it takes to stand this up.
Event Grid's a little different in this respect.
It's a very complicated solution to initially stand up,
not because it's hard to do, but because there's a lot
of moving parts associated with creating this seemingly
very simple and straightforward element that sits
between our occurrences and our ability
to communicate them for action.
The idea of being able to show it to you really just,
unfortunately, is not going to fit into our normal ‘how’ demo
as we normally will walk through that at the end of our conversation.
But rest assured, we're still going to answer you
how question for you, but instead of showing it to you here,
I'm going to invite you to join me over at ITPROTV,
take a look at more in-depth conversations
that I have around how to set up Event Grid
and many of these Azure services, and if you need
that level of detail and really want to see me
walk through it end-to-end, you can always check me out over there,
and you can see me or one of my colleagues show you
all the different things you want to know.
I'm going to wish you happy Azuring
until I see you again with another conversation, and remember,
no matter how easy or complex it is,
we'll always be here to explain it to you.