Microsoft recently released the preview version of the on-premises emulator for Azure Event Hubs. The emulator is designed to provide developers with a local development experience for Azure Event Hubs, allowing them to develop and test code with the services in isolation.
Azure Event Hubs, a cloud-native streaming service capable of streaming millions of events per second with low latency, has finally introduced a local emulator. This feature, long awaited by developers, is compatible with Apache Kafka and allows you to run existing Kafka workloads without code changes. Its arrival addresses a long-standing need, significantly improving the development experience.
The emulator is platform independent and available as a dockable image in the Microsoft Container Registry. It can run on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Developers can use automated scripts from the installer repository or spin up the emulator container using Docker Compose domain. The emulator is compatible with the latest Event Hubs SDKs and supports basic send and receive operations with Azure Event Hubs via AMQP.
As indicated in the company documentation, the emulator is primarily intended for development and testing purposes. There are functional differences between the emulator and the cloud service. For example, the emulator does not support features like capturing event centers, auto-scaling capabilities, and schema registry integration. Additionally, it cannot transmit messages using the Kafka protocol or support on-the-fly management operations using the client-side SDK.
On-premises emulators, such as Azure Event Hubs, are useful tools for developers in a local development environment. They make it easy to run and test applications locally, eliminating the need for cloud deployment. This speeds up the development process, reduces costs, and allows developers to work offline and simulate the real cloud environment for early problem detection.
While on-premises emulators are powerful tools, it’s important to remember that they may not perfectly replicate the real cloud environment. Therefore, extensive testing in the cloud environment before deployment is essential. Not all cloud services offer local emulators for each service, requiring the use of the actual cloud service for development and testing.
In a recent blog post on Google Cloud Pub/Sub for local development, independent consultant Ken Phanithin concluded that the Pub/Sub emulator is a powerful tool for developing and testing applications that use Google Cloud Pub/Sub. It allows offline work, reduces costs, and makes it easier to test for error handling and edge cases. However, the emulator does not perfectly replicate the real service, so testing with the actual service before deployment is crucial.
For more details about Azure Event Hubs, visit the documentation home page.
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