Learning how to build event streaming solutions with Microsoft Azure Event Hubs, Microsoft Fabric Event Streams, and any Apache Kafka compatible server and service is more interesting when you have real time data sources to work with.
This repo contains command line tools, written in Python, that can be used to retrieve real-time streaming data and related reference data from various APIs, and then routing the data to Apache Kafka compatible endpoints.
For each tool, there is a corresponding, pre-built (Docker-) container image
that you can pull and use instantly from this repo's container registry. There
are also pre-built templates for easily deploying the containers as an Azure
Container Instance (ACI), either feeding data into an Azure Event Hub or an
Fabric Event Stream custom endpoint. The container images will work with any
Apache Kafka compatible server or service, as long as you provide required
information. The supported authentication scheme for the Kafka endpoint is
SASL/PLAIN.
The container image documentation provides detailed information:
- GTFS Realtime - Public transport data
- NOAA Tides ands Currents - Water level and current data
- RSS Feeds - News and blog posts
- Pegelonline - Water level and current data
- USGS Instantaneous Values - Water quality and quantity data
Details about the tools and the data sources are provided in the respective README files.
The GTFS Realtime Bridge is a command line tool that retrieves to retrieve schedules, real-time vehicle position, real-time trip updates (live predictions of arrivals/departures), and alerts from practically any GTFS and GTFS-RT service. Over 1000 public transport agencies worldwide publish their data in GTFS format, and many of them also provide real-time data in GTFS-RT format.
In terms of sheer data volume, the feeds related to the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) will produce over 50 Gigabytes of data each day.
The NOAA data poller is a command line tool that can be used to retrieve real-time water level and current data from NOAA's National Ocean Service (NOS) Tides and Currents API. The data is available for over 3000 stations in the United States and its territories. The NOAA data is updated every 6 minutes, and the data volume is relatively low.
The RSS feed poller is a command line tool that can be used to retrieve real-time news and blog posts from any RSS feed. The tool can be configured with a list of RSS feed URLs or OPML files, and it will poll the feeds at a configurable interval. The RSS client will only forward new items from the feeds.
The Pegelonline data poller is a command line tool that can be used to retrieve real-time water level and current data from the German Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration (WSV) Pegelonline API. The data is available for over 3000 stations in Germany. The Pegelonline data is updated every 15 minutes, and the data volume is relatively low.
The Nextbus tool is a command line tool that can be used to retrieve real-time data from the Nextbus service and feed that data into Azure Event Hubs and Microsft Fabric Event Streams. The tool can also be used to query the Nextbus service interactively.
The USGS Instantaneous Values tool is a command line tool that can be used to retrieve real-time water quality and quantity data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Instantaneous Values API. The data is available for over 1.5 million stations in the United States and its territories. The USGS data is updated every 15 minutes, and the data volume is relatively low.
The Forza Motorsports telemetry bridge is hosted in a separate repository. The bridge app is designed to capture and forward Forza Motorsports telemetry data to Microsoft Azure Event Hubs or Microsoft Fabric Event Streams. It utilizes UDP to listen for telemetry data sent from Forza Motorsport games and forwards this data after processing and formatting into cloud event streams. The game is compatible with the XBox and PC games. For XBox, it requires a separate computer to run the bridge app. While there is no containerized version, there is a binary release in a ZIP file available from the releases page.