Azure Event hubs is the big data streaming service of Azure. It is designed for high throughput data streaming scenarios where customers may send billions of requests per day. Event Hubs uses a partitioned consumer model to scale out your stream and is integrated into the big data and analytics services of Azure including Databricks, Stream Analytics, ADLS, and HDInsight. With features like Event Hubs Capture and Auto-Inflate, this service is designed to support your big data apps and solutions. Additionally, IoT Hub uses Event Hubs for its telemetry flow path, so your IoT solution also benefits from the tremendous power of Event Hubs.

Azure IoT Hub is the cloud gateway that connects IoT devices to gather data and drive business insights and automation. In addition, IoT Hub includes features that enrich the relationship between your devices and your backend systems. Bi-directional communication capabilities mean that while you receive data from devices you can also send commands and policies back to devices. For example, use cloud-to-device messaging to update properties or invoke device management actions. Cloud-to-device communication also enables you to send cloud intelligence to your edge devices with Azure IoT Edge. The unique device-level identity provided by IoT Hub helps better secure your IoT solution from potential attacks.

Summary

Azure provides services specifically developed for diverse types of connectivity and communication to help you connect your data to the power of the cloud. Both Azure IoT Hub and Azure Event Hubs are cloud services that can ingest large amounts of data and process or store that data for business insights. The two services are similar in that they both support ingestion of data with low latency and high reliability, but they are designed for different purposes. IoT Hub was developed to address the unique requirements of connecting IoT devices to the Azure cloud while Event Hubs was designed for big data streaming. Microsoft recommends using Azure IoT Hub to connect IoT devices to Azure

To summarize, both solutions are designed for data ingestion at a massive scale. Only IoT Hub provides the rich IoT-specific capabilities that are designed for you to maximize the business value of connecting your IoT devices to the Azure cloud. If your IoT journey is just beginning, starting with IoT Hub to support your data ingestion scenarios will assure that you have instant access to the full-featured IoT capabilities once your business and technical needs require them.