Like any beast in Azure, learning about Event Grid quickly turns into a game of buzzword bingo. Lots of new words that actually represent something rather simple that, especially if you know something about messaging, you might even already understand.

After going through the headache of digesting these new terms and concepts I always like to reflect on what the overall concept actually is in simpler terms.

What is Event Grid?

Event Grid is a message router, and not much more. It knows how to consume events and distribute them to interested parties.

It’s actually like newsletter distribution. Imagine you want your newsletters published. You give over a copy of each to the distributor, they know who the subscribers are and how to send copies to each one. It doesn’t matter if a subscriber lives locally or overseas, that is the distributor’s concern.

In Event Grid this distributor is called a topic. The topic knows who to send events to via subscriptions_. _The subscriptions define who’s interested in receiving events and where they are.

From a publisher’s perspective, they simply send the events to the topic, without caring who the subscribers are.

Why use it?

Microsoft has great documentation helping you choose between messaging services that Azure provides.

Personally, I think the biggest benefit of Event Grid is its simplicity and cross-platform support.

Keeping it simple

A lot of messaging services provide heaps of functionality you may not need. Heck, look at just some of the Advanced Features that Service Bus offers:

Message sessions, Autoforwarding, Dead-letter queue, Scheduled delivery, Message deferral, Batching, Transactions, Filtering and action, Autodelete on idle, Duplicate detection, Geo-disaster recovery

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