One Petaflop

In recent discussions around big compute I was asked what a Petaflop (PFlop) would look like on Azure. Now, I had heard the term before and knew it was used to describe a considerable capacity of compute. So what is a petaflop (PFlop) and how do we convert this into something that we can all relate to?

Getting Acquainted With #Azure Service Bus Event Hubs

The Microsoft Azure ecosystem just keeps growing. This week Microsoft unveiled a very welcomed addition to the Microsoft Azure Service Bus. Event Hubs join ranks with Queues, Topics and Relays to offer options adapted to your needs.

Contrasting available Service Bus Flavors?

• Relays – are used to bridge communications over the cloud in a secure and transparent manner.
• Queues – are pipes that allow for many publishes and many consumers to communicate over a single channel. This is great for Competing Consumers and for Queue-based Load Leveling.
• Topics – are pipes that allow fan out scenarios, where each consumer gets his own copy of the inbound queue. It also has some handy features like filters. Use this flavor to implement Pipes and Filters.
• Event Hubs – are a bit more complex. Event Hubs enable the collection of event streams at high throughput, from a diverse set of devices and services. In other words, they help us deal with the 3 Vs.
  • Volume (amount of data)
  • Velocity (speed of data in and out)
  • Variety (range of data types and sources).

Microsoft Azure Service Bus Event Hubs

Event Hub join ranks with Queues, Topics and Relays to offer options adapted to your needs. They province the mechanisms necessary to collection of event streams at high throughput, from a diverse set of devices and services. They are composed of a Published Policy, of Consumer Groups and of Partitions.

Event Hubs support the following scenarios:

• Collecting event streams at high throughput from devices/services for use in real-time and batch processing.
• Connecting millions of devices from diverse platforms for sending data (with individual authentication and flow control).
• Process event streams per device “in order” using several backend services (publish/subscribe).

Considerations Prior to Creating an Event Hub

You must put some effort in capacity planning before you create an Event Hub. In order to make the right decisions let’s go over a couple details about Event Hubs.

Reaching Performance Targets on Azure by Preparing and Pre-Calculating Data

Azure is an amazing platform to work with! It creates interesting possibilities by offering a wide range of services that can be leveraged in order to produce exceptional end-user experiences.

Azure is built on commodity hardware and allows you to build elastic services that scale out in order to maintain a constant end-user experience. This is especially interesting when you want to start small and grow according to the demand for your services.

Enchanting as this may be, this is where many projects go wrong. Everything on the cloud has a price. On the cloud details matter! So choose the right architecture and be very cautious about the resources your application consumes.