AZ-204 Practice Question: Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services
You are building a solution that needs to send millions of events per second to Azure for processing. Which Azure service should you use to ingest the events?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Event Hubs with Azure Service Bus, assuming both are message brokers, but Event Hubs is optimized for high-throughput event ingestion while Service Bus is for reliable, ordered message delivery with features like sessions and transactions.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Azure Event Hubs
Azure Event Hubs is the correct choice because it is a big data streaming platform and event ingestion service designed to handle millions of events per second with low latency. It supports high-throughput data ingestion from sources like telemetry, logs, and clickstreams, making it ideal for this scenario.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Service Bus
Why it's wrong here
Azure Service Bus is designed for reliable, asynchronous messaging using queues and topics, supporting advanced features like transactional messaging, ordered delivery, and dead-lettering. While it handles high message volumes, its focus is on individual message processing and guaranteed delivery patterns, not the high-throughput, low-latency ingestion of millions of raw events for stream processing, which is a distinct use case.
- ✓
Azure Event Hubs
Why this is correct
Azure Event Hubs is purpose-built as a highly scalable big data streaming platform capable of ingesting millions of events per second from diverse sources. It excels at capturing, retaining, and processing massive streams of data, acting as the front door for event pipelines and enabling real-time analytics and batch processing. Its partitioned consumer group model allows multiple applications to process the same event stream concurrently and independently.
- ✗
Azure IoT Hub
Why it's wrong here
Azure IoT Hub provides a secure and scalable platform for connecting, monitoring, and managing billions of IoT devices. Its core functionality includes bidirectional communication, device-to-cloud telemetry, cloud-to-device commands, and device identity management. While it ingests device telemetry, its specialized focus on device lifecycle and management makes it distinct from a general-purpose, high-throughput event ingestion service for non-IoT data.
- ✗
Azure Notification Hubs
Why it's wrong here
Azure Notification Hubs is a highly scalable push notification engine designed to send millions of personalized push notifications to various mobile platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows. It focuses on outbound communication to end-user devices, abstracting platform-specific notification services. This service is not intended for ingesting raw event data from sources for processing or analytics, but rather for delivering messages to users.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-204 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-204 exam.