New Azure Event Grid capabilities support IoT solutions, event sources
Published date: May 21, 2024
Azure Event Grid has released new generally available features tailored to customers who are looking for a pub-sub message broker that can enable IoT solutions using MQTT protocol and can help build event-driven applications.
These new capabilities enhance Event Grid’s MQTT broker capability, make it easier to transition to Event Grid namespaces for push and pull delivery of messages, and integrate new event sources.
Features reaching General Availability:
- Use the last will and testament feature in compliance with MQTT v5 and MQTT v.3.1.1 specifications - so applications can get notifications when clients get disconnected, enabling management of downstream tasks to prevent performance degradation.
- Create data integrations that utilize both Event Grid Basic resources and Event Grid Namespace Topics (supported in Event Grid Standard). This means customers can utilize Event Grid namespace capabilities such as HTTP pull delivery without needing to reconstruct existing workflows.
- Configure event subscriptions on namespace topics to send messages to Azure Event Hubs. Since Event Hubs is compatible with Apache Kafka, this means customers can now run existing Kafka workloads without any code changes.
- Support new event sources such as Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Outlook leveraging Event Grid’s support for the Microsoft Graph API. This means customers can use Event Grid for new use cases, such as when a new employee is hired or a new is email received, processing that information and sending to other applications for more action.
Features in public preview:
Event Grid namespaces also now support in public preview OAuth 2.0 authentication for MQTT clients, and custom domain names, and push delivery to webhooks.
- OAuth 2.0 authentication allows clients to authenticate and connect with the MQTT broker using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) issued by any OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider, aside from Microsoft Entra Id, providing a lightweight and secure option for clients that are not provisioned in Azure.
- Custom domain name support enhances security and simplifies configuration by enabling customers to assign their own domain names to Event Grid namespace's MQTT and HTTP hostnames.
- Push delivery to webhooks enables customers to send messages to public endpoints, creating more options to build integrated solutions using namespace topics.
Event Grid has also released a number of other capabilities for Namespace Topics and in Event Grid Basic Tier, detailed in the blog below.