Introduction

This blog will brief on the distinction between Azure Service Bus
Topics and Azure Event Grid. First let us see a short introduction of
what these Azure services are, before getting deeper into their
distinctions. It is important to note the difference between services that
deliver an event and services that deliver a message. Service Bus
topics handles messages whereas Azure Event Grid handles events.

Event
An event is a lightweight notification of a state change. The publisher
of the event has no expectation of how the event is handled at the
other end. The consumer of the event decides what to do with the
received event. Events can be discrete units or part of a series.
Discrete events report state change and are actionable. To proceed
with the further step, the consumer only needs to know that something
happened. The event data has information on what happened but not
the data that triggered the event. Discrete events are ideal for
serverless solutions that need to scale.
Series events report a condition and are analyzable. The events are
time-ordered and interrelated. The consumer relies on the sequenced
series of events to examine what happened.

Message
A message is raw data produced by a service to be consumed or
stored. The message contains the data that triggered the message
pipeline. The publisher of the message has an expectation about how
the consumer handles the message. A contract exists between the two
sides. For example, the publisher sends a message with the raw data
and expects the consumer to create a file from that data and send a
response when the work is done.

Azure Service Bus Topics

Azure Service Bus Topic is a messaging service offered by Microsoft
Azure. Topics along with subscriptions provide a one-to-many form of
communication, in a publish/subscribe pattern. Messages are sent to a
topic and delivered to one or more subscriptions, based on filter rules
that are set on a per subscription basis. The subscriptions can use
additional filters to restrict the messages that are to be received. A
topic subscription resembles a virtual queue that receives copies of the
messages that are sent to the topic. Messages are received from a
subscription in the similar way they are received from a queue. Topic
Subscriptions support the following patterns like competing consumer,
temporal decoupling, load leveling, and load balancing.

Azure Event Grid

Azure Event Grid is a fully managed event service that enables us to
easily manage events across many different Azure services and
applications. It is an event routing service running on top of Azure
Service Fabric. It has built-in support for events coming from Azure
services, like storage blobs and resource groups. Event Grid also has
support for own events, using custom topics. Filters can be used to
route the specific events to different endpoints, multicast to multiple
endpoints, and make sure the events are reliably delivered. It supports
dead lettering for events which are not delivered to an endpoint. It
simplifies building event-driven applications and serverless
architectures. Mechanisms involved in Event Gird working is beyond
the scope of this blog. Find more information on Azure Event
Grid here.
Key Features of Azure Service Bus Topics vs
Event Grid
Azure Service Bus Topics
Azure Service Bus Topics is a heavyweight solution that offers a full
stack messaging bus. It has the following characteristics:
 Advanced messaging features like

1. FIFO

2. Batching/Sessions

3. Transactions

4. Dead lettering

5. Temporal control

6. Routing and filtering

7. Duplicate detection

8. At least once delivery

 Reliable asynchronous message delivery that requires polling.

  Ordered delivery, where messages will be transferred in the

exact order as they are received. This is something that is not

possible with Event Grid (possible with custom

implementation).

Azure Event Grid

Azure Event Grid is a lightweight notification and alerting solution. It
has the following characteristics:
 Dynamically scalable

 Messaging features like

1. At least once delivery

2. Dead Lettering

3. Includes retry mechanism

 Advanced message routing and filtering capabilities

 Uses push mechanism, which means there is no need for long

polling.

 Provides out of the box integration with various Azure services,

both as event sources and event handlers.

 Lower cost

 Serverless
Comparison of Services
Service Purpose Type When to use

High-value Order processing

Service
enterprise Message and financial
Bus
messaging transactions

Event
Event Reactive React to status
distribution
Grid programming changes
(Discrete)

Message/Event Delivery
Event Grid is a publish/subscribe(push-push) model where all the
events are pushed to the event handlers, whereas in the case of Azure
Service Bus Topic it keeps checking the topic subscription if there are
any messages available. This means that the Message Processor can
control when and how many messages it wants to process and thus
controls the load handled. In short Azure Event Grid uses push-model
whereas Azure Service Bus Topics uses a pull-model.
 Protocols used by Azure Service Bus Topic to communicate –

AMQP, TCP/IP, HTTP.

 Azure Event Grid is based on HTTP protocol.

Message/Event Processing
Since Azure Service Bus Topics uses pull mechanism the Message
Processor oversees getting new messages. It has full control on the
pace in which it processes the messages. If the ingestion throughput is
more, the messages will pile up until the size of the topic is met. With
Azure Event Grid the messages are pushed into the Event Handlers.
This means that the Event Handler needs to be capable to handle the
load and provide enough throttling to protect from crashing.
Throughput
Event Grid allows the processing of 10 million events per second, per
region. This is comparatively more than what Azure Service Bus can
handle unless it is distributed across multiple Service Bus namespaces
which has a limit of 100 per subscription.
Message/Event Sizes
Azure Service Bus supports the maximum message size of 256 KB for
basic/standard tier or 1 MB in case of the premium tier. Anything
beyond these quotas is rejected and an exception is received by the
calling code. In Event Grid topic, the size of an array can be up to 1
Mb. Each event in an array is limited to 64 KB.

Conclusion
In short, both these services are used for delivering events and
messages throughout a solution. Although these services have some
similarities, each service is designed for certain scenarios. Any of this
can be used based on necessity. When we are looking for processing
millions of events with high throughput, velocity and near-real-time
processing Azure Event Grid can opt-in comparison with Azure
Service Bus Topic whereas Azure Service Bus Topics can be used for
more fan-out transactional processing.
Also, explore how Serverless360 can help in lowering the Total Cost
of Ownership on supporting serverless applications in real-time.
Serverless360 has got capabilities that can address the gaps in dealing
with Service Bus topic subscriptions and Event Grid.
RELATED POSTS