When you think of an event-driven architecture (EDA), what is the first technology that comes to mind? For most, it’s Apache Kafka—the open-source messaging technology purpose-built for real-time data streaming. In fact, Apache Kafka is so popular that many IT decision makers believe it is the only technology needed to achieve the potential benefits of EDA. Unfortunately, the reality is not quite that simple.
Event-Driven Architecture, Explained
Apache Kafka is just a data distribution channel, like a phone line, that provides the underlying infrastructure needed for moving events around your IT infrastructure. A phone line sits inactive until someone picks up the phone to send or respond to a message. Similarly, something needs to trigger an event to be sent on a Kafka queue, and something else needs to receive and process that event and potentially take action on it.
And this is just a scenario for simple events. What if you need to correlate multiple events that each need to occur at a specific time? What if a series of events needs to be complete in order to trigger another event? What if an event is actually that specific event that doesn’t occur as expected? How do you make sure that your responses to these events are governed so they are consistent? How do you scale event delivery and processing to enterprise-level requirements? In order to address all of these questions, you will need a multi-technology approach.
Event Collection, Event Delivery, Event Processing, Oh My!
So what exactly is required to implement event-driven architectures in your business? Let’s start with selecting the right broker to deliver events across your business. Apache Kafka is the best solution for certain event processing use cases, but not all of them. It’s important to evaluate the technical merits of Kafka compared with other brokers, such as Apache Pulsar, MQTT or Apache Pulsar, MQTT or Jakarta Messaging. You may find a technology better suited to your technical requirements, or you may need multiple brokers to address different use cases across your business
Once you’ve selected the right event broker, you will need a solution to connect to the broker, to produce and consume events, and rules for responses to events. One approach is to write custom code to address each of these problems. However, much of that code is low-value logic that does not drive business value. Do you really want to invest the time and resources to write that yourself?
Another approach is to invest in additional software for event processing, integration, and API management. Unfortunately, most vendor-supported Kafka offerings do not provide all of these different technologies—forcing IT departments to assemble a solution for event-driven architectures across multiple vendors, which inherently adds time, complexity, and cost to implementing event-driven architectures. Unless you choose TIBCO.
TIBCO Simplifies Event-Driven Architectures
TIBCO is the only vendor in the market that can provide all of the foundational components needed to implement event-driven architectures, including integration, messaging, event processing, and API management capabilities. This simplifies the implementation of event-driven architectures so you can take full advantage of your real-time business data while minimizing your implementation costs.
With TIBCO, you can easily model and mock AsyncAPIs and generate event-driven applications from these AsyncAPI specifications. These can then be connected to the best-fit event broker for your use case with both open-source and commercial messaging technologies, including Apache Kafka and Pulsar support, to choose from. Then, with native connectivity to Kafka and Pulsar across our integration and event processing capabilities, you can implement business rules to make predictive, preventative, and actionable business decisions.
Operate More Intelligently with TIBCO
Implementing event-driven patterns in your business can complement an API-led integration strategy to help you operate your business more efficiently and intelligently. To learn more about how TIBCO helps our customers create better business outcomes with event-driven architectures, see our real-world successes below:
- Sara Assicurazioni: Reduced claim processing times by 50 percent
- University of Chicago Medicine: Saves lives by reducing cardiac arrests by 15-20 percent
- Citibank: Accelerated credit card approval and delivery to under two days
