| title | Azure Event Hubs Dedicated Tier Overview | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| description | Discover Azure Event Hubs Dedicated tier, a single-tenant solution for enterprise-scale, low-latency event streaming. Evaluate its benefits for mission-critical workloads. | ||||
| ms.topic | overview | ||||
| ms.date | 07/28/2025 | ||||
| ms.custom |
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Azure Event Hubs Dedicated tier is a single-tenant solution designed to meet the needs of enterprise-scale, mission-critical event streaming workloads. This article provides an overview of the Dedicated tier, highlighting its key features, benefits, and use cases, showing how it supports high-performance, low-latency applications using Event Hubs SDK or Apache Kafka APIs.
The Dedicated tier of Event Hubs offers several benefits to customers who need to run mission-critical workloads at enterprise-level capacity.
These clusters are optimized for low end-to-end latency and high performance. These clusters enable businesses to handle high-velocity and high-volume data streaming.
Dedicated clusters can stream events at the scale of gigabytes per second or millions of events per second for most of the use cases. You can also scale these clusters to accommodate changes in event streaming volume.
Event Hubs dedicated clusters minimize the latency jitter and ensure consistent performance with guaranteed capacity.
Event Hubs dedicated clusters operate on a single-tenant architecture. This architecture ensures that the allocated resources aren't being shared with any other tenants. Unlike with other tiers, you don't see any cross-tenant interference in a dedicated cluster.
The dedicated cluster offers self-serve scaling capabilities that allow you to adjust the capacity of the cluster according to dynamic loads and to facilitate business operations. You can scale out during spikes in usage and scale in when the usage is low.
Dedicated clusters include all features of the Premium tier and more. The service also manages load balancing, operating system updates, security patches, and partitioning. You can spend less time on infrastructure maintenance and more time on building your event streaming applications.
In most streaming scenarios, data is lightweight, typically less than 1 MB, and requires high throughput. There are instances where messages can't be divided into smaller segments. Self-serve dedicated clusters can accommodate events up to 20 MB of size at no extra cost. This capability allows Event Hubs to handle a wide range of message sizes to ensure uninterrupted business operations. For more information, see Send and receive large messages with Azure Event Hubs.
Dedicated clusters are provisioned and billed by capacity units (CUs), which is a preallocated amount of CPU and memory resources.
How much you can ingest and stream per CU depends on factors such as the:
- Number of producers and consumers.
- Number of partitions.
- Producer and consumer configuration.
- Payload size.
- Egress rate.
To determine the necessary number of CUs, you should carry out your anticipated event streaming workload on an Event Hubs dedicated cluster while you observe the cluster's resource utilization. For more information, see When should I scale my dedicated cluster.
Event Hubs dedicated clusters come in two distinct types: self-serve scalable clusters and legacy clusters. These two types differ in their support for the number of CUs, the amount of throughput each CU provides, and the regional and zone availability.
As a dedicated cluster user, you can determine the type of cluster by examining the availability of the capacity scaling feature in the portal. If this capability is present, you're using a self-serve scalable cluster. Conversely, if it isn't available, you're using a legacy dedicated cluster. Alternatively, you can look for the Azure Resource Manager properties related to dedicated clusters.
Event Hubs self-serve scalable clusters are based on new infrastructure and allow users to scale the number of CUs allocated to each cluster. By creating a dedicated cluster through the Event Hubs portal or Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates), you gain access to a self-service scalable cluster. To learn how to scale your dedicated cluster, see Scale Event Hubs dedicated clusters.
Approximately one CU in a self-serve scalable cluster provides ingress capacity ranging from 100 MB/sec to 200 MB/sec, although actual throughput might fluctuate depending on various factors.
With self-serve scalable clusters, you can purchase up to 10 CUs for a cluster in the Azure portal. In contrast to traditional clusters, these clusters can be scaled incrementally with CUs ranging from 1 to 10. If you need a cluster larger than 10 CUs, you can submit a support request to scale up your cluster after its creation.
Important
To enable Availability zones on a Event Hubs dedicated cluster, it must be provisioned with three or more CUs.
Event Hubs dedicated clusters created before the availability of self-serve scalable clusters are referred to as legacy clusters.
To use these legacy clusters, direct creation through the Azure portal or ARM templates isn't possible. Instead, you must submit a support request to create one.
Approximately one CU in a legacy cluster provides ingress capacity ranging from 50 MB/sec to 100 MB/sec, although actual throughput might fluctuate depending on various factors.
With a legacy cluster, you can purchase up to 20 CUs.
Legacy Event Hubs dedicated clusters require at least eight CUs to enable availability zones. Availability zone support is only available in Azure regions with availability zones.
Important
Migrating an existing legacy cluster to a self-serve cluster isn't currently supported. For more information, see Migrating a legacy cluster to a self-serve scalable cluster.
You can determine the cluster type that you're using with the following methods.
| Method | Action | Self-serve scalable clusters | Legacy clusters | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Use the portal | Check for the presence of the Scale tab under the cluster. | The Scale page is available in the cluster UI. | No Scale page is available in the cluster UI. | |
| Use Azure Resource Manager | Check for the supportsScaling Azure Resource Manager property on the cluster. |
Check for the presence of the Scale page under the cluster. | No Scale page is available in the cluster UI. | Check this property in the portal, the Azure CLI, or PowerShell. Needs API version 2022-01-01-preview or newer. |
Use nslookup |
Run the nslookup command on a namespace in a cluster. |
CNAME maps to *.cloudapp.azure.com. |
CNAME maps to *.cloudapp.net. |
Example: nslookup ns.servicebus.windows.net. |
The Event Hubs Dedicated offering is billed at a fixed monthly price with a minimum of four hours of usage. The Dedicated tier offers all the features of the Premium plan, but with enterprise-scale capacity and limits for customers with demanding workloads.
For more information about quotas and limits, see Event Hubs quotas and limits.
[!INCLUDE event-hubs-dedicated-clusters-faq]
Explore more about Event Hubs Dedicated:
- Create an Event Hubs cluster through the Azure portal.
- Event Hubs Dedicated pricing: Learn about pricing tiers and capacity options.
- Event Hubs FAQ: Find answers to frequently asked questions about Event Hubs.