Azure Event Hubs with Kafka API

Did you know Azure Event Hubs speaks Kafka? You can use existing Kafka clients and configurations with Event Hubs.

Configuration

from kafka import KafkaProducer, KafkaConsumer

# Event Hubs connection as Kafka
bootstrap_servers = "mynamespace.servicebus.windows.net:9093"
sasl_username = "$ConnectionString"
sasl_password = "Endpoint=sb://mynamespace.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=...;SharedAccessKey=..."

producer = KafkaProducer(
    bootstrap_servers=bootstrap_servers,
    security_protocol="SASL_SSL",
    sasl_mechanism="PLAIN",
    sasl_plain_username=sasl_username,
    sasl_plain_password=sasl_password,
    value_serializer=lambda v: json.dumps(v).encode('utf-8')
)

# Send message
producer.send('my-topic', {'event': 'order_created', 'order_id': '12345'})
producer.flush()

Consumer Example

consumer = KafkaConsumer(
    'my-topic',
    bootstrap_servers=bootstrap_servers,
    security_protocol="SASL_SSL",
    sasl_mechanism="PLAIN",
    sasl_plain_username=sasl_username,
    sasl_plain_password=sasl_password,
    group_id='my-consumer-group',
    auto_offset_reset='earliest'
)

for message in consumer:
    print(f"Received: {message.value}")

Why Use This?

• Migrate Kafka workloads to Azure without code changes
• Use existing Kafka tooling and libraries
• Get Event Hubs benefits: scaling, retention, capture to blob

The Kafka API compatibility makes Event Hubs a drop-in replacement for many streaming scenarios.