DP-900 Describe core data concepts Practice Question
You are implementing a data pipeline that ingests millions of events per second from IoT devices. The pipeline must tolerate failures and guarantee exactly-once processing. Which Azure service should you use to ingest the events?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure IoT Hub with Event Hubs because both handle IoT data, but IoT Hub is for device management and control, not for high-throughput event ingestion with exactly-once guarantees.
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 for high-throughput scenarios, capable of ingesting millions of events per second. It supports exactly-once processing through checkpointing and partition-based offset management, and its built-in replication and availability zones provide fault tolerance.
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 IoT Hub
Why it's wrong here
Azure IoT Hub is optimized for device management and bidirectional communication with per-device authentication and twin state, not for bulk telemetry ingestion at massive scale. Its throughput is measured in messages per day rather than millions per second, and the overhead of device identity and command pathways degrades raw event throughput. For this pipeline ingesting millions of events per second, Event Hubs is the appropriate event streaming service.
- ✓
Azure Event Hubs
Why this is correct
Azure Event Hubs is a fully managed event streaming platform built for high-throughput telemetry, capable of ingesting millions of events per second across partitioned consumer groups. It supports checkpointing to track processing progress, allowing at-least-once delivery that, when combined with idempotent consumers, enables effectively exactly-once processing. Its design as a distributed log with sequential writes and parallel reads makes it the right choice for massive ingestion workloads.
- ✗
Azure Service Bus
Why it's wrong here
Azure Service Bus is a broker for enterprise messaging, providing features like sessions, transactions, and dead-letter queues, but it is not engineered for streaming-scale ingestion. Its throughput is typically in the low thousands of messages per second and it processes messages individually rather than as a continuous data log. While it offers at-least-once delivery, it does not natively support exactly-once semantics at the scale needed for millions of events per second.
- ✗
Azure Queue Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Queue Storage is a simple message queue designed for decoupling application components, with messages up to 64KB and a strict at-least-once delivery guarantee. It cannot scale to millions of events per second because a single storage queue is limited to about 500 transactions per second, and it lacks consumer group abstractions or event replay. This makes it unsuitable for a high-throughput ingestion pipeline, as exactly-once processing is not natively achievable.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Data Roles and Core Concepts
Key term
Pipeline
A pipeline is an automated series of steps that takes code from development to production, ensuring quality and speed.
Key term
Service
A service is a software component or system that performs a specific function and is available to be used by other programs or users over a network.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DP-900 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 DP-900 exam.