Azure Event Hubs Geo-Replication Now Generally Available for Robust Multi-Region Data Streaming

Summary of "Azure Event Hubs Geo-Replication Reaches General Availability" (InfoQ, July 2025):
Microsoft has announced the General Availability (GA) of Geo-replication for Azure Event Hubs, now offered in both Premium and Dedicated tiers. This advancement brings enterprise-grade redundancy and availability to Event Hubs, a scalable event processing platform for large-scale data and events with low latency.

Key Features and Details​

• Primary-Secondary Model:
  Geo-replication uses a primary-secondary architecture. One region (primary) remains active, serving producers and consumers. Secondary regions are "hot standbys," continuously mirroring the primary's configuration, but not directly accessible until promoted for failover.
• Seamless Failover:
  If a failure, maintenance, or outage happens in the primary region, the secondary can be quickly promoted to active (primary) with minimal downtime, ensuring business continuity.
• Replication Consistency Modes:
  Two main configurations are available:
• Synchronous: Writes are acknowledged only after replication to a quorum of selected regions and zones, which can achieve RPO (Recovery Point Objective) = 0, implying no data loss.
• Asynchronous: Offers configurable lag (higher performance/less consistency), suitable when minimal lag is acceptable.
• Visibility & Metrics:
  New monitoring capabilities give detailed insight into the health and status of replicas, helping admins know when failover is appropriate and maintain high availability.
• Pricing:
  Geo-replication charges depend on the primary region’s location. (Detailed pricing is available on the Azure Event Hubs site.)

Comparison with Other Cloud Providers​

• Google Cloud Pub/Sub: Offers in-region high availability. Cross-region requires custom failover logic.
• AWS (Amazon MSK/Kinesis/EventBridge): Uses external tools like MirrorMaker 2 for Kafka or requires users to architect complex cross-region redundancy for streaming, not natively integrated as in Azure EH.

Takeaway​

Azure Event Hubs' integrated geo-replication makes multi-region redundancy and disaster recovery simpler, reduces application logic overhead, and gives fine-grained RPO control—even allowing for zero data loss.
Source: InfoQ Article, July 2025 (paraphrased)

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Source: infoq.com Azure Event Hubs Geo-Replication Reaches General Availability