Send million events to Azure event hub every 5 seconds - azure

I have a simple requirement, 1 million devices need to send a simple heartbeat to the event hub every 5 seconds, that works out to 200000 events per second. Since 1 throughput unit supports only 1000 events\sec, do I really need to purchase 200 throughput units to implement a simple heartbeat mechanism?
I'm really wondering about the claim of event hub supporting millions of events per second, how is that possible if a throughput unit only supports 1000. I need a HUGE number of throughput units and that's going to burn every last dollar. Unless I'm really missing something.

Related

Azure Function with Event Hub trigger receives weird amount of events

I have an Event Hub and Azure Function connected to it. With small amounts of data all works well, but when I tested it with 10 000 events, I got very peculiar results.
For test purposes I send into Event hub numbers from 0 to 9999 and log data in application insights and in service bus. For the first test I see in Azure that hub got exactly 10 000 events, but service bus and AI got all messages between 0 and 4500, and every second message after 4500 (so it lost about 30%). In second test, I got all messages from 0 to 9999, but every second message between 3500 and 3200 was duplicated. I would like to get all messages once, what did I do wrong?
public async Task Run([EventHubTrigger("%EventHubName%", Connection = "AzureEventHubConnectionString")] EventData[] events, ILogger log)
{
int id = _random.Next(1, 100000);
_context.Log.TraceInfo("Started. Count: " + events.Length + ". " + id); //AI log
foreach (var message in events)
{
//log with ASB
var mess = new Message();
mess.Body = message.EventBody.ToArray();
await queueClient.SendAsync(mess);
}
_context.Log.TraceInfo("Completed. " + id); //AI log
}
By using EventData[] events, you are reading events from hub in batch mode, thats why you see X events processing at a time then next seconds you process next batch.
Instead of EventData[] use simply EventData.
When you send events to hub check that all events are sent with the same partition key if you want try batch processing otherwise they can be splitted in several partitions depending on TU (throughput units), PU (Processing Units) and CU (Capacity Units).
Egress: Up to 2 MB per second or 4096 events per second.
Refer to this document.
Throughput limits for Basic, Standard, Premium..:
There are a couple of things likely happening, though I can only speculate with the limited context that we have. Knowing more about the testing methodology, tier of your Event Hubs namespace, and the number of partitions in your Event Hub would help.
The first thing to be aware of is that the timing between when an event is published and when it is available in a partition to be read is non-deterministic. When a publish operation completes, the Event Hubs broker has acknowledged receipt of the events and taken responsibility for ensuring they are persisted to multiple replicas and made available in a specific partition. However, it is not a guarantee that the event can immediately be read.
Depending on how you sent the events, the broker may also need to route events from a gateway by performing a round-robin or applying a hash algorithm. If you're looking to optimize the time from publish to availability, taking ownership of partition distribution and publishing directly to a partition can help, as can ensuring that you're publishing with the right degree of concurrency for your host environment and scenario.
With respect to duplication, it's important to be aware that Event Hubs offers an "at least once" guarantee; your consuming application should expect some duplicates and needs to be able to handle them in the way that is appropriate for your application scenario.
Azure Functions uses a set of event processors in its infrastructure to read events. The processors collaborate with one another to share work and distribute the responsibility for partitions between them. Because collaboration takes place using storage as an intermediary to synchronize, there is an overlap of partition ownership when instances are scaled up or scaled down, during which time the potential for duplication is increased.
Functions makes the decision to scale based on the number of events that it sees waiting in partitions to be read. In the case of your test, if your publication pattern increases rapidly and Functions sees "the event backlog" grow to the point that it feels the need to scale by multiple instances, you'll see more duplication than you otherwise would for a period of 10-30 seconds until partition ownership normalizes. To mitigate this, using an approach of gradually increasing speed of publishing over a 1-2 minute period can help to smooth out the scaling and reduce (but not eliminate) duplication.

Azure Service Bus performance issue MassTransit

So I've been playing around with MassTransit and Azure Service Bus Premium, here's a sample of one of my consumers. Hypothetical initial load for one publisher would be about 1000 messages a second. However whenever I attempt to configure a consumer, it seems to generally average out at about 20-40 messages per loop.
cfg.ReceiveEndpoint("ReceivePoint", e =>{
e.PrefetchCount = 500;
e.MaxConcurrentCalls = 20;
e.Batch<IBlahContract>(b => {
b.MessageLimit = 500;
b.TimeLimit = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1);
b.Consumer(() => new BatchBlahConsumer(provider.GetRequiredService<IRepository>(), provider.GetRequiredService<ILogger<BatchBlahConsumer>>()));
});
});
I did try Throughput test which managed a thousand plus messages a second. Did anyone get any tips on how to achieve optimal performance? And might it make more sense to consider a managed instance of RabbitMq since this needs to scale? It just feels like Azure Service Bus isn't really suited to such high throughput?
Edit: Slight addition to this, suspect it's related to a requirement to keep prefetch to about 20 and then consumer concurrency is what really defines performance. So basically, it needs consumer level configuration in terms of estimated requirements. Which would make me lean more towards using rabbit.
Your batch message limit is 500, which is honestly way too high. With the MaxConcurrentCalls set at 20, you'll always hit the timeout instead of the batch size limit, because the Azure client library will only ever deliver 20 messages at once, and the batch size is significantly higher than that value (500 vs 20). You need to set it high enough that it can complete a batch or you'll always be completing the batch on timeout alone.
Lower the batch size, and increase the MaxConncurrentCalls, so that they are the same, or at least so the batch size is less than the concurrent calls limit, so that batches can be completed upon message receipt instead of waiting to time out.

Does IoTHub delay messages by a batching interval in a custom endpoint to Azure Storage?

I am sending some messages in a pipeline using Azure IoT Edge. There is a custom endpoint (say, GenericEndpoint) that I have set up, which will send/put the messages to Azure Blob storage. I am using a route to push the device messages to the specific endpoint GenericEndpoint.
The batch frequency of GenericEndpoint is set at 60 seconds. So 1 batch creates 1 single file with some messages, in the container specified.
Lets say, there are N messages in a single blob batch file (say, blobX) in the specific container. If I take the average of the difference between the IoTHub.EnqueuedTime(i) of each message i, in blobX and the 'Creation Time' of blobX, and call it AVG, I get:
I think, this essentially gives me the average time that those N messages spent in iothub before being written in the blob storage. Now what I observe here is that, if p and q are respectively the first and last message written in blobX, then
But since the batching interval was set to 60 seconds, I would expect this average or AVG to be approximately near 30 seconds. Because, if the messages are written as soon as they arrive, then the average for each batch file would be near 30 seconds.
But in my case, AVG ≈ 90 seconds, which suggests the messages wait for atleast approximately one batching interval (60 seconds in this case) before being considered for a particular batch.
Assumption: When a batch of messages are written in a blob file, they are written all at once.
My question:
Is this delay of one batch interval or 60 seconds intentional? If yes, then I assume it will change on changing the batching interval to say 100 seconds.
If, no, then, does it usually take 60 seconds to process a message in iothub and then send it through a route to a custom endpoint? Or am I looking at this from a completely wrong angle?
I apologize beforehand if my question seems confusing.

Solution for delaying events for N days

We're currently writing an application in Microsoft Azure and we're planning to use Event Hubs to handle processing of real time events.
However, after an initial processing we will have to delay further processing of the events for N number of days. The process will work like this:
Event triggered -> Place event in Event Hub -> Event gets fetched from Event Hub and processed -> Event should be delay for X days -> Event gets' further processed (two last steps might be a loop)
How can we achieve this delay of further event processing without using polling or similar strategies. One idea is to use Azure Queues and their visibility timeout, but 7 days is the supported maximum according to the documentation and our business demands are in the 1-3 months maximum range. Number of events in our system should be max 10k per day.
Any ideas would be appreciated, thanks!
As you already mentioned - EventHubs supports only 7 days window of data to be retained.
Event Hubs are typically used as real-time telemetry data pipe-lines where data seek performance is critical. For 99.9% usecases/scenarios our users typically require last couple of hours, if not seconds.
However, after the real-time processing is over, and If you still need to re-analyze the data after a while, for ex: run a Hadoop job on last months data - our seek pattern & store are not optimized for it. We recommend to forward the messages to other data archival stores which are specialized for big-data queries.
As - data archival is an ask that most of our customers naturally look for - we are releasing a new feature which automatically archives the data in AVRO format into Azure storage.

Should the event hub have same number of partitions as throughput units?

For Azure event hub 1 though put unit equals 1MB/sec ingress. So it can take 1000 messages of 1 KB. If I select 5 or more throughput units would I be able to ingest 5000 messages/ second of 1KB size with 4 partitions? What would be egress in that case? I am not sure about limitation on Event Hub partition, i read that it is also 1MB/sec. But then does that mean to use event hub effectively i need to have same number of partitions?
Great question.
1 Throughput Unit (TU) means an ingress limit of 1 MB/sec or 1000 msgs/sec - whichever happens first. You pay for TUs and you can change TUs as per your load requirements. This is your knob to control the bill. And TUs are set on a given Event Hubs Namespace!
When you buy 1 TU for an EventHubs Namespace and create a number of EventHubs in it, the the limit of 1 MB/sec or 1000 msgs/sec applies cumulatively across them. The limit also applies to each partition individually. Although, sometimes you might get lucky in some regions where load is low.
Consider these principles while deciding on no. of partitions in eventhub for your service:
The intent of Partitions is to offer high-availability. If you are sending to Eventhubs and you want the sends to succeed NO MATTER WHAT you should create multiple partitions and send using EventHubClient.Send (which doesn't confine the send to a particular partition).
The no. of partitions will determine how fat the event pipe is & how fast/parallelly you can receive & process the events. If you have 10 partitions on your EventHub - it's capacity is effectively capped at 10 TUs. You can create 10 epoch receivers in parallel & consume & process events. If you envision that the EventHub that you are currently creating now can quickly grow 10-fold create as many partitions and keep the TU's matching the current load. Analogy here is having multiple lanes on a freeway!
Another thing to note is, a TU is configured at namespace level. And, one Event Hubs namespace can have multiple EventHubs in it and each EventHub can have a different no. of partitions.
Answers:
If you select 5 or more TUs on the Namespace and have only 1 EventHub with 4 partitions you will get a max. of 4 MB/sec or 4K msgs/sec.
Egress max will be 2X of ingress (8 MBPS or 8K msgs/sec). In other words, you could create 2 patterns of receives (e.g. slow and fast) by creating 2 consumer groups. If you need more than 2X parallel receives then you will need to by more TUs.
Yes, ideally you will need more partitions than TUs. First model your partition count as mentioned above. Start with 1 TU while you are developing your solution. Once done, when you are doing load testing or going live, increase TUs in tune with your load. Remember, you could have multiple EventHubs in a Namespace. So, having 20 TUs at Namespace level and 10 EventHubs with 4 partitions each can deliver 20 MB/sec across the Namespace.
More on EventHubs
One partition goes to one TPU. Think of TPUs as a processing engine. You can't take advantage of more TPUs than you have partitions. If you have 4 partitions, you can't use more than 4 TPUs.
It's typical to have more partitions than TPUs, for the following reasons
You can scale the number of TPUs up if you have a lot of traffic, but you can't change the number of partitions
You can't have more concurrent readers than you have partitions. If you want to have 5 concurrent readers, you need 5 partitions.
As for throughput, the limits are 1 MB ingerss/2 MB egress per TPU. This covers the typical scenario where each event is sent both to cold storage (eg a database) and Stream analytics or an event processor for analysis, monitoring etc.

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