Does Microsoft Azure Event Hub have support for dead-letter-topic and dead-letter-queues , like vanilla Kafka has?

Question

I was reading through the Microsoft Azure Event Hub documentation , but couldn't find mention of dead-letter-topic and/or dead-letter-queue . I know that Kafka has support for dead-letter-topic and dead-letter-queue

My question is , does Microsoft Azure Event Hub have support for dead-letter-topic and dead-letter-queue ?

Answer 1

There's no such a thing for Azure Event Hub. For "dead-lettering" you need to use Azure Service Bus.

I would also advise you to check/compare Azure messaging services below:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-grid/compare-messaging-services

Answer 2

Short answer: no, not out of the box.

Longer answer: there's a great summary from Microsoft here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/serverless/event-hubs-functions/resilient-design#streaming-benefits-and-challenges

Missing inherent dead-letter support: A dead-letter channel is not a native feature in Event Hubs or Kafka. Often, the concept of dead-lettering is integrated into a streaming solution to account for data that cannot be processed. This functionality is intentionally not an innate element in Event Hubs and is only added on the consumer side to manufacture a similar behavior or effect. If you need dead-letter support, you should potentially review your choice of streaming message service.

That page goes on to explain the retry mechanisms that are available for Event Hub processing through Azure Functions. Alternatively, you could roll your own. Confluent has an article on that here: https://www.confluent.io/blog/error-handling-patterns-in-kafka/