Despite what the documentation on Microsoft says, an Azure subscription is not needed.
OAG uses Microsoft Azure's Event Hubs as a platform for customers to connect to and retrieve flight schedule changes and updates for the Flight Info Alerts product. The official documentation (e.g. for Python) provided by Microsoft for integration with the Event hubs frequently recommends developers to either use Azure Blob Storage or Azure Tables as a checkpointing reference to coordinate event retrievals from the event hub. However, do note that an Azure subscription for blob storage or Azure Tables is not necessary to retrieve events from the event hub and do checkpointing.
It is possible to integrate your own checkpointing process by either:
- Extending the CheckpointStore classes from the official documentation/Git to create your own checkpointing mechanism. E.g. Java or in Python
- Use the EventPosition class in Java or PartitionContext class in Python to set the read starting position on the Event Hub partition. You can save off the offset from the event meta data when reading and then when you restart the 'receive' events after a failure or stoppage you can pass in the event position which has a last enqueued ‘offset’ property. This option means you can save the offset as a value in a database or a file to use later when restarting. E.g. Java or Python