Better integrations and higher productivity with Azure Event Grid

Since we announced general availability of Azure Event Grid, we have seen great adoption and received good feedback on what else you want to do with your event-driven architectures. Today we are happy to announce public preview support for a host of new features aimed at improving your developer experience, expanding the list of Azure services that natively integrate with Event Grid, and embracing standards that allow cross cloud interop.

CloudEvents open standard support

Multi-cloud architectures for enterprise solutions had become a common trend, as customers are picking up best of breed tools and services from across multiple cloud vendors, and so they build their solutions spanning public cloud platforms and services from different vendors. We want to make sure our customers have the ability to integrate Azure services and resources on these multi-cloud solutions. As part of this effort to improve interoperability between public cloud platforms, SaaS companies and other vendors, we have been working with a number of other cloud providers on an open standard for events called CloudEvents. This project has been created in the Serverless Working Group of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF), and we recently announced Azure being the first major public cloud to offer first-class support for CloudEvents at CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen.

Azure Event Grid is one of the first public cloud services with available support for CloudEvents, so you can now publish and consume events using both CloudEvents and Azure native events schemas. This means today you can pump Azure Storage events in CloudEvents format into the serverless platform of your choice for handling, or you can ingest events from other cloud platform’s services publishing CloudEvents into the Azure platform and process them on your beloved Azure Functions or Logic Apps already connected to Event Grid. All natively done, with no custom code involved.

If you are as excited as we are with this announcement, check out how we support CloudEvents on Event Grid and give it a try.

Higher productivity with events custom schemas and easier endpoint validation

If the CloudEvents support wasn’t enough regarding increased interoperability for the Azure Serverless platform, Event Grid now has support for input mappings, which let your bring your own schema and map the fields in your events to Event Grid, and we will take care of the rest! With input mappings, you won’t need to make any changes to your existing events with a non-native schema, but would like to take advantage of Event Grid’s availability, filtering, or any other features. Take a look at how input mappings work on Event Grid starting today.

Security is always a sensitive matter, and the validation process for creating an Event Subscription is essential for security purposes. However, some platforms like IFTTT don’t have support to modify the body of HTTP responses POSTs used in validation. To support these platforms, we are announcing alternative forms of endpoint validation. This doesn’t mean that your existing validation solutions will stop working, but all future validation events will also include a validation URL from now on. Making a GET request to this validation URL will also validate your endpoint, meaning you can just copy and paste into your browser.

Improved development experience with new integrations and client SDKs

We are committed to expanding the number of integrations for Azure Event Grid on both ends – event sources and event handlers.  This allows you to get more value from your usage of existing Azure services and build more interesting scenarios by connecting different pieces.

Working towards our goal of connecting all Azure services, earlier this year, we added support for Service Bus events with a “queue not empty” event, so that you can wake up your process and begin reading as soon as a message lands in an idle queue. Today, we are happy to announce support for Azure Media Services events which will allow you to take action at various stages of processing and handling video. We are also excited to announce that in the coming weeks we will add Azure Container Registry events as a new source as well.

We have also added support for two new event handlers: Azure Storage Queues and Azure Relay Hybrid Connections.

With Storage Queues, you’ll be able to handle long running jobs, buffer incoming workloads on your endpoints, and implement competing consumer models. Similar solutions can also be achieved with Event Hubs as an event handler.

Hybrid Connections will now allow you to consume your events to a WebSocket, or an on-prem server application, and still get real time notifications. With hybrid connections, any application that can’t expose a public HTTP endpoint can just open a WebSocket connection to Hybrid Connections, and Event Grid will deliver these events to Hybrid Connections, which then will be automatically relayed to the app. This is incredibly useful for local compute scenarios, where the app is in your desktop, or if you have an on-prem service and don’t want to punch any holes in your firewall.

Finally, to help you manage and run your services integration with Event Grid, we are introducing Java management and client SDKs for Event Grid. For our existing GA features, we are also releasing stable versions of the .NET, Node, Python, Go, and Ruby management and client SDKs. Check the list of new and updated client SDKs for more information on any of them.

Availability in more regions

Last but not least, we are happy to announce availability in Japan East, Japan West, Australia East, and Australia Southeast…with many more regions coming soon!

Today we are also announcing a bunch of new features and improvements on Azure Functions, sharing our focus on improving development productivity and security, as we all aim to make life easier for developers on any platform and letting you focus on what’s really important: your code! Take a look at the Azure Functions Build announcements and see what’s happening on the fast-changing serverless world in Azure.

We cannot wait to see the applications you will build with these! That’s why we’d like to invite you to join our IoT on Serverless online hackathon, which just started accepting submissions from May 2nd, so you can get the chance to make some money while building your coolest IoT app using your favorite serverless technologies. This is not only a chance to earn money, but also fame awaits you as we will feature the winning projects on the Azure blog to spread the word on the awesome serverless solutions you are building on Azure. Don’t miss the chance!

Happy Eventing! The Event Grid team

Source: Azure Blog Feed