event-domains.md

title	description	ms.topic	ms.date
Event Domains in Azure Event Grid	This article describes how to use event domains to manage the flow of custom events to your various business organizations, customers, or applications.	conceptual	04/13/2021

Understand event domains for managing Event Grid topics

This article describes how to use event domains to manage the flow of custom events to your various business organizations, customers, or applications. Use event domains to:

• Manage multitenant eventing architectures at scale.
• Manage your authorization and authentication.
• Partition your topics without managing each individually.
• Avoid individually publishing to each of your topic endpoints.

Event domain overview

An event domain is a management tool for large numbers of Event Grid topics related to the same application. You can think of it as a meta-topic that can have thousands of individual topics.

Event domains provide you the same architecture used by Azure services like Storage and IoT Hub to publish their events. They allow you to publish events to thousands of topics. Domains also give you authorization and authentication control over each topic so you can partition your tenants.

Example use case

[!INCLUDE event-grid-domain-example-use-case.md]

Access management

With a domain, you get fine grain authorization and authentication control over each topic via Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC). You can use these roles to restrict each tenant in your application to only the topics you wish to grant them access to.

Azure RBAC in event domains works the same way managed access control works in the rest of Event Grid and Azure. Use Azure RBAC to create and enforce custom role definitions in event domains.

Built in roles

Event Grid has two built-in role definitions to make Azure RBAC easier for working with event domains. These roles are EventGrid EventSubscription Contributor (Preview) and EventGrid EventSubscription Reader (Preview). You assign these roles to users who need to subscribe to topics in your event domain. You scope the role assignment to only the topic that users need to subscribe to.

For information about these roles, see Built-in roles for Event Grid.

Subscribing to topics

Subscribing to events on a topic within an event domain is the same as creating an Event Subscription on a custom topic or subscribing to an event from an Azure service.

Important

Domain topic is considered an auto-managed resource in Event Grid. You can create an event subscription at the domain scope without creating the domain topic. In this case, Event Grid automatically creates the domain topic on your behalf. Of course, you can still choose to create the domain topic manually. This behavior allows you to worry about one less resource when dealing with a huge number of domain topics. When the last subscription to a domain topic is deleted, the domain topic is also deleted irrespective of whether the domain topic was manually created or auto-created.

Domain scope subscriptions

Event domains also allow for domain-scope subscriptions. An event subscription on an event domain will receive all events sent to the domain regardless of the topic the events are sent to. Domain scope subscriptions can be useful for management and auditing purposes.

Publishing to an event domain

When you create an event domain, you're given a publishing endpoint similar to if you had created a topic in Event Grid.

To publish events to any topic in an Event Domain, push the events to the domain's endpoint the same way you would for a custom topic. The only difference is that you must specify the topic you'd like the event to be delivered to.

For example, publishing the following array of events would send event with "id": "1111" to topic foo while the event with "id": "2222" would be sent to topic bar:

[{
  "topic": "foo",
  "id": "1111",
  "eventType": "maintenanceRequested",
  "subject": "myapp/vehicles/diggers",
  "eventTime": "2018-10-30T21:03:07+00:00",
  "data": {
    "make": "Contoso",
    "model": "Small Digger"
  },
  "dataVersion": "1.0"
},
{
  "topic": "bar",
  "id": "2222",
  "eventType": "maintenanceCompleted",
  "subject": "myapp/vehicles/tractors",
  "eventTime": "2018-10-30T21:04:12+00:00",
  "data": {
    "make": "Contoso",
    "model": "Big Tractor"
  },
  "dataVersion": "1.0"
}]

Event domains handle publishing to topics for you. Instead of publishing events to each topic you manage individually, you can publish all of your events to the domain's endpoint. Event Grid makes sure each event is sent to the correct topic.

Limits and quotas

Here are the limits and quotas related to event domains:

• 100,000 topics per event domain
• 100 event domains per Azure subscription
• 500 event subscriptions per topic in an event domain
• 50 domain scope subscriptions
• 5,000 events per second ingestion rate (into a domain)

If these limits don't suit you, open a support ticket or send an email to askgrid@microsoft.com.

Pricing

Event domains use the same operations pricing that all other features in Event Grid use.

Operations work the same in event domains as they do in custom topics. Each ingress of an event to an event domain is an operation, and each delivery attempt for an event is an operation.

Next steps

• To learn about setting up event domains, creating topics, creating event subscriptions, and publishing events, see Manage event domains.