Everything that happens in a company’s cloud environment holds potential significance from an operational standpoint. One firm may wish to log certain events for auditing purposes, while another might be interested in triggering an automated action when an important change takes place.

Microsoft Corp. hopes to ease the creation of such workflows with a new service introduced today called Azure Event Grid. It’s described as a first-of-its-kind tool that can be used to capture any type of activity data and deliver updates as a sort of stream. This approach is reminiscent of Apache Kafka, an open-source framework used by enterprises to facilitate fast communications between internal workloads.

A service can “subscribe” to receive information about certain events from Azure Event Grid. Microsoft said the arrangement provides lower latency than traditional data transfer methods, which should be a major draw for the use cases it’s targeting.

The technology giant is focusing mainly on operational workflows that handle various administrative tasks within Azure deployments. A company could, for instance, have its infrastructure monitoring tool tune into virtual-machine changes and notify staff when something important happens. It’s also possible to set off automated responses in cases where reacting manually would be impractical.

Companies can trigger actions using custom tooling or Azure Functions. Modeled after Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Lambda, the latter service makes it possible to have a piece of code execute automatically under predefined conditions. More importantly, there’s no need to manage the underlying infrastructure or set up any software components to run the script.

Azure Service Grid is currently available in preview. The first 100,000 operations performed in a given month are free, while the rest are priced at 30 cents per million. Microsoft will charge 60 cents per million once the service is in general availability.

Image: Microsoft