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Azure Event Hubs VS Google Cloud Dataflow

Compare Azure Event Hubs VS Google Cloud Dataflow and see what are their differences

Azure Event Hubs logo Azure Event Hubs

Learn about Azure Event Hubs, a managed service that can ingest and process massive data streams from websites, apps, or devices.

Google Cloud Dataflow logo Google Cloud Dataflow

Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully-managed cloud service and programming model for batch and streaming big data processing.
  • Azure Event Hubs Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-27
  • Google Cloud Dataflow Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03

Azure Event Hubs features and specs

  • Scalability
    Azure Event Hubs can handle millions of events per second, making it highly scalable for large-scale data ingestion solutions.
  • Fully Managed
    As a fully managed service, it reduces the overhead associated with managing infrastructure, allowing teams to focus on application development.
  • Integration
    Seamlessly integrates with other Azure services like Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Functions, and more, making it a versatile solution within the Azure ecosystem.
  • Data Retention
    Supports event retention of up to seven days, allowing applications to replay streams and facilitating debugging or application state recovery.
  • Security
    Offers comprehensive security features, including encryption at rest and in transit, VNet service endpoints, and Shared Access Signatures (SAS) for access control.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Event Hubs

  • Complexity in Setup
    The initial setup and configuration can be complex for new users, especially those unfamiliar with Azure services.
  • Cost
    Costs can accumulate quickly, particularly with high-throughput or extensive data retention requirements, potentially impacting budget-conscious projects.
  • Limited On-premises Integration
    Primarily designed for cloud environments, making it less suitable for on-premises scenarios without additional integration layers.
  • Latency
    Although generally low, latency can become noticeable in high-load scenarios, which might affect applications requiring real-time processing.
  • Partition Management
    Dynamic partition scaling is not available. Once set, partition counts cannot be changed without creating a new event hub, which requires thoughtful upfront planning.

Google Cloud Dataflow features and specs

  • Scalability
    Google Cloud Dataflow can automatically scale up or down depending on your data processing needs, handling massive datasets with ease.
  • Fully Managed
    Dataflow is a fully managed service, which means you don't have to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.
  • Unified Programming Model
    It provides a single programming model for both batch and streaming data processing using Apache Beam, simplifying the development process.
  • Integration
    Seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud services like BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Bigtable.
  • Real-time Analytics
    Supports real-time data processing, enabling quicker insights and facilitating faster decision-making.
  • Cost Efficiency
    Pay-as-you-go pricing model ensures you only pay for resources you actually use, which can be cost-effective.
  • Global Availability
    Cloud Dataflow is available globally, which allows for regionalized data processing.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Built-in fault tolerance mechanisms help ensure uninterrupted data processing.

Possible disadvantages of Google Cloud Dataflow

  • Steep Learning Curve
    The complexity of using Apache Beam and understanding its model can be challenging for beginners.
  • Debugging Difficulties
    Debugging data processing pipelines can be complex and time-consuming, especially for large-scale data flows.
  • Cost Management
    While it can be cost-efficient, the costs can rise quickly if not monitored properly, particularly with real-time data processing.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Using Google Cloud Dataflow can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to another cloud provider.
  • Limited Support for Non-Google Services
    While it integrates well within Google Cloud, support for non-Google services may not be as robust.
  • Latency
    There can be some latency in data processing, especially when dealing with high volumes of data.
  • Complexity in Pipeline Design
    Designing pipelines to be efficient and cost-effective can be complex, requiring significant expertise.

Analysis of Google Cloud Dataflow

Overall verdict

  • Google Cloud Dataflow is a strong choice for users who need a flexible and scalable data processing solution. It is particularly well-suited for real-time and large-scale data processing tasks. However, the best choice ultimately depends on your specific requirements, including cost considerations, existing infrastructure, and technical skills.

Why this product is good

  • Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed service for stream and batch data processing. It is based on the Apache Beam model, allowing for a unified data processing approach. It is highly scalable, offers robust integration with other Google Cloud services, and provides powerful data processing capabilities. Its serverless nature means that users do not have to worry about infrastructure management, and it dynamically allocates resources based on the data processing needs.

Recommended for

  • Organizations that require real-time data processing.
  • Projects involving complex data transformations.
  • Users who already utilize Google Cloud Platform and need seamless integration with other Google services.
  • Developers and data engineers familiar with Apache Beam or those willing to learn.

Azure Event Hubs videos

Messaging with Azure Event Hubs

Google Cloud Dataflow videos

Introduction to Google Cloud Dataflow - Course Introduction

More videos:

  • Review - Serverless data processing with Google Cloud Dataflow (Google Cloud Next '17)
  • Review - Apache Beam and Google Cloud Dataflow

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Azure Event Hubs and Google Cloud Dataflow)
Stream Processing
100 100%
0% 0
Big Data
10 10%
90% 90
Data Management
34 34%
66% 66
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Azure Event Hubs and Google Cloud Dataflow

Azure Event Hubs Reviews

We have no reviews of Azure Event Hubs yet.
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Google Cloud Dataflow Reviews

Top 8 Apache Airflow Alternatives in 2024
Google Cloud Dataflow is highly focused on real-time streaming data and batch data processing from web resources, IoT devices, etc. Data gets cleansed and filtered as Dataflow implements Apache Beam to simplify large-scale data processing. Such prepared data is ready for analysis for Google BigQuery or other analytics tools for prediction, personalization, and other purposes.
Source: blog.skyvia.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Google Cloud Dataflow should be more popular than Azure Event Hubs. It has been mentiond 14 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Azure Event Hubs mentions (4)

  • Anyone routing firewall logs to Microsoft Event Hubs?
    We're looking into some sort of cloud-based solution to route our Palo Alto firewall logs to across our customer base. I'm with an MSP that manages over a hundred PA firewalls. I was intrigued by the Event Hubs (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/event-hubs/) solution as a way to push logs to it and then ingest them from there into our SIEM, without having to deal with challenges of multi-tenancy and... Source: over 2 years ago
  • Microsoft Releases Stream Analytics No-Code Editor into General Availability
    Microsoft released Azure Stream Analytics no-code editor, a drag-and-drop canvas for developing jobs for stream processing scenarios such as streaming ETL, ingestion, and materializing data to data into general availability. The no-code editor is hosted in the company’s big-data streaming platform and event ingestion service, Azure Event Hubs. Interestingly, the offering follows up after Confluent's recent release... Source: over 2 years ago
  • Infrastructure as code (IaC) for Java-based apps on Azure
    Sometimes you don’t need an entire Java-based microservice. You can build serverless APIs with the help of Azure Functions. For example, Azure functions have a bunch of built-in connectors like Azure Event Hubs to process event-driven Java code and send the data to Azure Cosmos DB in real-time. FedEx and UBS projects are great examples of real-time, event-driven Java. I also recommend you to go through 👉 Code,... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Setting up demos in Azure - Part 1: ARM templates
    For event infrastructure, we have a bunch of options, like Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid and Azure Event Hubs. Like the databases, they aren't mutually exclusive and I could use all, depending on the circumstance, but to keep things simple, I'll pick one and move on. Right now I'm more inclined towards Event Hubs, as it works similarly to Apache Kafka, which is a good fit for the presentation context. - Source: dev.to / over 4 years ago

Google Cloud Dataflow mentions (14)

  • How do you implement CDC in your organization
    Imo if you are using the cloud and not doing anything particularly fancy the native tooling is good enough. For AWS that is DMS (for RDBMS) and Kinesis/Lamba (for streams). Google has Data Fusion and Dataflow . Azure hasData Factory if you are unfortunate enough to have to use SQL Server or Azure. Imo the vendored tools and open source tools are more useful when you need to ingest data from SaaS platforms, and... Source: over 2 years ago
  • Here’s a playlist of 7 hours of music I use to focus when I’m coding/developing. Post yours as well if you also have one!
    This sub is for Apache Beam and Google Cloud Dataflow as the sidebar suggests. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How are view/listen counts rolled up on something like Spotify/YouTube?
    I am pretty sure they are using pub/sub with probably a Dataflow pipeline to process all that data. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Best way to export several GCP datasets to AWS?
    You can run a Dataflow job that copies the data directly from BQ into S3, though you'll have to run a job per table. This can be somewhat expensive to do. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Why we don’t use Spark
    It was clear we needed something that was built specifically for our big-data SaaS requirements. Dataflow was our first idea, as the service is fully managed, highly scalable, fairly reliable and has a unified model for streaming & batch workloads. Sadly, the cost of this service was quite large. Secondly, at that moment in time, the service only accepted Java implementations, of which we had little knowledge... - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Azure Event Hubs and Google Cloud Dataflow, you can also consider the following products

Amazon Kinesis - Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Azure Stream Analytics - Azure Stream Analytics offers real-time stream processing in the cloud.

Amazon EMR - Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that makes it easy to quickly process vast amounts of data.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service - Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch in the AWS Cloud.

Qubole - Qubole delivers a self-service platform for big aata analytics built on Amazon, Microsoft and Google Clouds.