Page 24 - MSDN Magazine, February 2018

MICROSOFT AZURE
Event-Driven Architecture
in the Cloud with Azure
Event Grid
David Barkol
It’s an exciting time to be a cloud architect. The pace of innovation has brought to the forefront a set of new challenges and technologies that are reshaping the way solutions are designed. Benefitting from this growth are the developers and architects who can choose from an abundance of services and options.
As developers go through the exercise of decomposing their architectures to take advantage of new services like Azure Func- tions, Logic Apps and others, familiar obstacles surface. In many cases, we find ourselves once again piecing together the “glue” that allows these services to work in concert. The recent launch of Azure Event Grid aims to solve this challenge by providing a first-class event routing service in the cloud that’s fully managed, scalable and extremely flexible.
In this article, I’ll explore the flexibility of Azure Event Grid and show how it can be used to resolve familiar challenges in enter- prise applications.
The Reversal of Dependencies
The notion of using events in a solution or application isn’t new. In fact, event-driven programming has successfully utilized the concept for quite some time. Pub/Sub queues and GUIs are just a few of the examples that leverage this idea of reacting to events that happen in an organization, application or system.
Azure Event Grid is a new, fully managed service that supports the routing of events by utilizing a publisher-subscriber model.
One of the core tenants of an event-driven architecture is to reverse the dependencies that existing services may have with each other. Figure 1 shows an example of a set of processes that rely on each other to communicate and support a Human Resources (HR) department.
This article discusses:
• Designconsiderationsforserverlessandevent-basedarchitectures • Benefits of using an event routing service for reliability and scale
in the cloud
• Integrating multiple Azure services and events
Technologies discussed:
Microsoft Azure, Event Grid, Functions, Logic Apps, Visual Studio
Code download available at:
github.com/dbarkol/AzureEventGrid
20 msdn magazine