Azure Event Grid

Definition

Azure Event Grid is a fully managed event routing service that delivers events from Azure services, custom applications, and third-party sources to subscriber endpoints in a publish-subscribe model.

Overview

Event Grid sits at the center of Azure's event-driven architecture story. Rather than applications polling for changes, resources such as Blob Storage, Resource Manager, IoT Hub, or a custom application publish events — a blob created, a virtual machine deallocated, an order placed — to a topic, and Event Grid fans those events out to any number of subscribers, including Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Event Hubs, webhooks, or queues. Unlike a message queue that stores messages until a consumer pulls them, Event Grid is push-based and optimized for very low latency at massive scale, routinely handling millions of events per second. It uses the CloudEvents schema by default, an open standard that also makes it interoperable with event routers from other clouds. Subscriptions support filtering, so a consumer can register interest in only a subset of event types or subjects, and Event Grid handles retries with exponential backoff and dead-lettering for events that repeatedly fail delivery. Event Grid complements rather than replaces Azure's other messaging services: Azure Service Bus suits ordered, transactional business messaging, and Event Hubs suits high-throughput telemetry streaming, while Event Grid is purpose-built for reactive, discrete event notifications that trigger downstream workflows. It is a common backbone for serverless architectures, where a single storage event can kick off a chain of Functions, Logic Apps, and third-party integrations without any polling infrastructure to manage.

Key Features

• Push-based publish-subscribe event routing at near-real-time latency
• Native integration with dozens of Azure services as event sources and sinks
• Support for the open CloudEvents schema alongside Event Grid's native schema
• Advanced filtering on event type, subject, and payload for targeted subscriptions
• Built-in retry policies with exponential backoff and dead-lettering
• Custom topics for routing events from your own applications
• Domains for managing large numbers of related topics as a single unit
• Serverless, pay-per-event pricing with no infrastructure to provision

Use Cases

Alternatives

Frequently Asked Questions

Related in Cloud