A big part of REST’s ascension into mainstream popularity was a robust ecosystem of enablement tools created by the open-source and vendor community. In fact there’s an entire category of tools called API Management made up of components such as portals, catalogs, gateways and policy/analytics tools. It’s a big piece of the puzzle, and one for which there’s no equivalent in the world of events.
Enough people have asked me about “API management for events” that I thought I’d break down the value prop of API management platforms and see what it would look like to apply those same capabilities to the eventing world. To that end, let’s dive into what API management does for RESTful APIs.
When becoming familiar with the world of events, people familiar with these tools very quickly ask what their equivalents are. The answer is complex because the event-driven ecosystem is way less advanced in some regards, so let’s map the API management components to what should exist for this new capability and call it an event management platform.
The world of events introduces a number of things APIs don’t deal with, such as guaranteed delivery which requires both statefulness and persistence, the gateway, portal and policy management/analytics components which still must exist to facilitate development, and discovery and lifecycle management. As such, I’ll explain what each component should do in the context of eventing:
Event management platforms that provide functionality and value similar to API management platforms will help the asynchronous eventing paradigm achieve the same level of prominence as API-led initiatives. APIs aren’t going anywhere, of course, they’re still ideal for many use cases. But as a developer or architect you should be able to use the right pattern (command, query or event) and protocol (HTTP, AMQP, MQTT, REST, WebSocket) for every use case. Event management will also accelerate development cycles and eliminate the need to build and train dedicated development teams that specialize in event-driven interactions.
Solace recognizes the need for and potential value of event management, and is working to accelerate and simplify the entire event lifecycle, from design and development right through operation. It’s innovative, disruptive, and customer-centric, and it’s the right thing to do!