Azure Event Grid, Microsoft’s service for passing events between different pieces of software, has emerged from beta with some new features, broader global availability, and reliability guarantees.
Event Grid is a managed service that works like the glue between different services, passing bundles of information from one piece of software to another. It’s an important component for building modern applications composed of multiple different pieces. That’s especially true for so-called serverless applications, which are designed to use compute resources only in reaction to external events.
That serverless design pattern is increasingly popular with developers, thanks to the rise of cloud services that enable the creation of just-in-time provisioned compute, complete with sub-second billing for whatever resources a program uses. Event Grid works by filtering and routing different requests, without requiring developers to provision servers for handling that task.
Microsoft director of Azure Compute Corey Sanders told VentureBeat that he sees Event Grid as being particularly useful for modern applications, but added that traditional monolithic apps can also use it to better integrate with more modern components.
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In beta, Event Grid has been handling 300 million events per week, and Sanders said he expects that to increase significantly now that Microsoft has declared the product generally available. Microsoft guarantees that it will be operational 99.99 percent of the time, now that the service has reached general availability.
Looking toward the future, it’s easy to see how Event Grid could expand to every Azure service, since events can kick off a variety of different functions, like adding rows to a database or spinning up a virtual machine.
Customers pay for Event Grid per million operations that they route through the service every month. People who want to try it out will be able to get the first 100,000 operations every month for free, which is useful for developers who want to test the functionality of Event Grid before rolling it into production.
Correction March 7: This story originally listed Corey Sanders’s title as corporate vice president. He is the director of Azure compute.
