Azure Event Hubs is designed for the high-throughput ingress of data streams generated by devices and services. It provides a telemetry ingestion service that can collect, transform, and store millions of events. It offers similar capabilities to the IoT Hub, but there are differences as well. When to use which solutions depends on the scenario. If your solution demands high-throughput data ingestion only, Azure Event Hubs is a more cost-effective solution than the IoT Hub. However, if your solution requires bi-directional communication, such as communicating from the cloud to your devices, the IoT Hub is a better solution.

To make the correct decision on which solution to use for your IoT architecture, you can look at the following differences:

• Device protocol support: Azure Event Hubs supports HTTPS and AMQP, whereas the IoT Hub supports MQTT, MQTT over WebSockets, AMQP, AMQP over WebSockets, and HTTPS. The IoT Hub supports file upload.
• Communication patterns: The Event Hubs only supports event ingress where the IoT Hub supports device-to-cloud communications and cloud-to-device communications as well.
• Security: The Event Hubs supports Shared Access Policies, where the IoT Hub supports per-device identity and revocable access control.
• Monitoring: The IoT Hub offers a complete set of monitoring capabilities, where the Event Hubs only offers aggregate metrics.
• Scale: The IoT Hub can scale up to millions of simultaneously connected devices and millions of events per second, whereas the Event Hubs can scale up to 5,000 AMQP connections per namespace.
• SDKs: The Event Hubs supports .NET Core, .NET Framework, Java, Python, Node.js, Go, C (send only), and Apache Storm (receive only), whereas the IoT Hub supports .NET, C, Node.js, Java, and Python.

In the next section, we are going to cover Azure Event Grid, by explaining how to route events with Azure Event Grid to an Azure function.