Microsoft has added features to Azure Event Grid for those looking for a pub-sub message broker that can enable IoT options using the MQTT protocol and can help build event-driven applications.

These capabilities enhance Event Grid’s MQTT broker capability, make it easier to transition to Event Grid namespaces for push and pull delivery of messages, and integrate new event sources.

The last-will-and-testament feature can be used in compliance with MQTT v5 and v3.1.1 so applications can be notified when clients get disconnected, enabling management of downstream tasks to prevent performance degradation.

Data integrations can be created that use both Event Grid Basic resources and Event Grid Namespace Topics, supported in Event Grid Standard. This means users can handle Event Grid namespace capabilities such as HTTP pull delivery without needing to reconstruct existing workflows.

Event subscriptions ca be configured on namespace topics to send messages to Azure Event Hubs. Since Event Hubs is compatible with Apache Kafka, this means users can run existing Kafka workloads without any code changes.

It supports new event sources such as Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Outlook leveraging Event Grid’s support for the Microsoft Graph API. This means Event Grid can be used for new use cases, such as when an employee is hired or an email is received, processing that information and sending it to other applications for more action.

Event Grid namespaces also support in public preview OAuth 2.0 authentication for MQTT clients, and custom domain names, and push delivery to webhooks.

OAuth 2.0 authentication allows clients to authenticate and connect with the MQTT broker using JSon Web Tokens (JWTs) issued by any OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider, aside from Microsoft Entra ID, providing a lightweight and secure option for clients that are not provisioned in Azure.

Custom domain name support enhances security and simplifies configuration by enabling users to assign their own domain names to Event Grid namespace’s MQTT and HTTP hostnames.

Push delivery to webhooks lets users send messages to public endpoints, creating more options to build integrations using namespace topics.

Event Grid has also released a number of other capabilities for Namespace Topics and in Event Grid Basic Tier, detailed at techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/messaging-on-azure-blog/announcing-new-pub-sub-capabilities-in-azure-event-grid/ba-p/4146881.