Gartner’s Top 3 Trends to Help Your Business Transition to Event-Driven Architecture

Gartner recently published a report titled “Top 3 Trends in Application Architecture That Enable Digital Business” whereby they identified key trends of Mesh Application and Service Architecture (MASA), API Platform, and Event Processing as enablers of digital business. Gartner believes adopting these trends will help businesses make the transition to event-driven architecture, which has been identified as an essential part of digital transformation and a contributor to success in adapting to digital business.

The first trend, Mesh Application and Service Architecture, is about using an API and event mediation layer to bridge between fit-for-purpose multi-experience apps and the multi-grained services that underpin them. The idea of a mesh-type integration architecture makes good sense; it is consistent with the idea of an event mesh that similarly bridges applications and services in an event-driven architecture.

The second trend, API Platform, is about creating an environment to manage and govern your APIs as a platform of shared business capabilities. This is required for designing, building, publishing, and consuming APIs. These functions are delivered for REST-style application environments via API management platforms such as Apigee, MuleSoft, and others. These capabilities are currently not available in event-driven environments that rely on publish-subscribe message patterns, which is why we are addressing these requirements by investing in and bringing to market an Event Portal.

The third trend, Event Processing, is all about treating events as first-class citizens and using a push/pull interaction model rather than request-response. Gartner notes that event processing is becoming an essential component of digital competence¹, enabling:

• Real-time awareness
• Business process automation
• Improved experiences
• IoT integration
• Agility

But, notably, Gartner points out the existing challenges with implementing event processing and event-driven architecture: a lack of skills in the market, when to appropriately use event-driven principles, and a lack of tooling for development and management. As previously noted, Solace is investing in broader market activities to address these challenges. Our Event Horizon initiative will address the critical need for skilling developers, architects, and application leaders in the finer art of event-driven architecture design principles. It will be the first step of many toward a low-code design and development environment for event-driven design, and our work to standardize AsyncAPI will go a long way to making event-driven a more accepted pattern for real-time digital enterprises.

Read more about Gartner’s 5-stage event-driven architecture maturity model in this piece about how we’re helping enterprises make event-driven architecture pervasive.

_{¹ Source: Gartner “Top 3 Trends in Application Architecture That Enable Digital Transformation”, 28 October 2019, Anne Thomas, Yefim Natis, Mark O’Neill}