Fabric RTI 101: Azure Event Hubs

Azure Event Hubs is Microsoft’s fully managed event streaming service. If you’re familiar with Apache Kafka, you can think of Event Hubs as Microsoft’s cloud-native equivalent. It’s designed to handle extremely high volumes of events — we’re talking about millions of events per second — all without you having to stand up and manage complex clusters yourself.

One of the most important features of Event Hubs is that it offers Kafka-compatible endpoint. That means if you already have applications, tools, or client libraries that were built to talk to Kafka, in many cases they can connect to Event Hubs with little or no modification. That’s a huge benefit because it reduces friction for teams migrating workloads into Azure or building hybrid architectures.

Event Hubs can scale to millions of events per second.

They are also deeply integrated with the rest of the Azure ecosystem. You can wire them up to services like Stream Analytics, Functions, Synapse, or Data Lake for downstream processing. And now, with Fabric Eventstreams, they connect directly into Fabric, so you can route data into Lakehouses, KQL databases, or dashboards with minimal configuration. It essentially becomes a first-class ingestion option for real-time pipelines in Fabric.

Because it’s cloud-native and fully managed, Event Hubs takes away much of the operational overhead of running your own Kafka cluster. You don’t have to worry about provisioning servers, handling upgrades, or scaling manually — Azure does that for you. This makes it especially attractive for organizations that want Kafka-like power but with Azure’s reliability and integration built in.

If Kafka is like buying and maintaining your own fleet of trucks to move packages around, Event Hubs is like using a managed logistics service. You still get the same delivery model, but Azure handles the heavy lifting — the roads, the drivers, the scheduling, the scaling — so you can focus on what’s inside the packages: your data.

So, Event Hubs brings Kafka-style event streaming into the Azure cloud, with massive scalability, easy integration, and reduced management effort — making it an ideal backbone for real-time workloads in Microsoft-based environments.  

Learn more about Fabric RTI

If you really want to learn about RTI right now, we have an online on-demand course that you can enrol in, right now. You’ll find it at Mastering Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

2026-02-04