Is your event broker equal to the task?
By Shawn McAllister, Solace’s CTO and Chief Product Officer
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| Concept art representing business complexity generated by Blue Willow. |
A smart broker should provide three critical attributes:
Fine-grained routing and filtering
When dealing with complex business operations, events need to be intelligently routed and filtered to be made available to the right people at the right time, not just served up en masse. A smart event broker allows consumers to subscribe to only receive the subset of events they need, in the original sequence.
Take the operational example of a retailer using microservices to stream order-related events – but different functions are being dealt with in different locations. Those application users who only want to process new orders do not require information such as shipped orders or returns; they just require information based on new orders.
It’s also the job of a smart broker to publish information in a way that allows fine-grained filtering of events based on topic taxonomy. Consider an example of an aviation authority that is required to manage incoming and outgoing flights from a particular airport – sounds straightforward, but there will be a multitude of events related to each and every flight.
A smart broker can handle the volume of events related to all flights, but allow subscribers to drill-down by airline, arrival/departure, on time/delayed, inbound and outbound gate – meaning they can receive detailed information based on the factors relevant to their job function or area of responsibility.
Event mesh-ability
Organisations who require real-time event streaming for operational use cases need to look at how their broker can support an “event mesh”. An event mesh is an architecture layer consisting of a network of event brokers interconnected to allow events from one application to be dynamically routed and received by any other application no matter where these applications are deployed – no-cloud, private cloud, or public cloud. An event mesh makes all data that touches the mesh available on demand in a secure, reliable manner – exactly where and when needed.
It provides the ability to integrate legacy applications, data stores, modern microservices, software-as-a-service (SaaS), Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices dynamically and all in real-time.
If IT and analytics is legacy integration, and operational technology (OT) is the sensing of devices, then an event mesh is the glue that ties old technology with the new. Consider a manufacturing organisation using IoT edge devices for asset tracking, product quality monitoring and predictive maintenance. With an event mesh, sensor events in manufacturing processes can be leveraged with real-time streaming analytics to improve quality and detect machine maintenance issues sooner.
Operations are always on, and so are customer and employee expectations. An event mesh supporting real-time data delivery ultimately means no waiting. Spikes in demand are deftly handled so systems don’t crash.
Rich application integration
Catering to the complex business ecosystems they support, a smart broker easily connects a variety of applications and devices without worrying about protocol translation from one to another. A distributed organisation, for example, has many custom applications in many different languages which need to have shared information.
Operational use cases will usually involve this complex mix of legacy and modern applications as well as taking on further data streams from IoT devices – all communicating using different languages and protocols. These streams may also need to be accessed by partners or third parties using standards-based protocols such as AMQP, MQTT or webhooks – hence the need for a smart broker to support integration across this application landscape.
Integration of SaaS, legacy and packaged applications and middleware are also required across an organisation. This requires the use of specialised event connectors to event-enable these applications so the event broker you choose needs to have many of these “off-the-shelf” connectors as well.
The right broker for the job
It’s an event-driven world. Business operations are only going to become more data-driven, dynamic and real-time, demanding event streaming support beyond simply analytics-based log brokering. This is where the smart broker needs to step up to the plate to provide the architecture to keep its stakeholders connected, always on the same page, and able to make up to date data-driven decisions. We’re talking developers, users and consumers, employees, partners and end-customers. It’s a community of stakeholders that is only going to keep growing.
Explore
Read part 1 at https://techtouchasia.blogspot.com/2024/01/your-event-driven-apps-are-only-as-good.html
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