What We Announced in our Winter Solace Product Update

One of my favorite things about my role as Solace’s chief product officer is talking with customers about how they use PubSub+ Platform, what they like most about it, and what we could do to make it meet their needs even better than it does today.

Even more fun than that is the payoff, like our recent Winter Solace Product Update webcast during which a few members of my team and I introduced and demonstrated a bunch of exciting new features and functionality enhancements that make our products easier to deploy, manage and integrate.

If you missed the webcast and want to watch it soup to nuts, I highly recommend it because we covered a lot of good stuff and had fun with our “winter is coming” inspired theme as you can see! If you’d rather cherrypick and watch the parts you find most interesting, read on for a summary of what we covered that contains links to each section and demo. (I will tell you that I saved what’s arguably the best for last, but try not to skip ahead because there’s good stuff throughout!)

Easier to Deploy

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and in the case of implementing EDA with PubSub+ Platform, that first step is deploying an event broker. You can watch the on-demand version of this part of the webcast here, and here’s a recap of the ways we’ve made it easier to deploy PubSub+ Platform:

• Availability in Marketplaces: We want to make things easy from the get-go, so we’ve worked hard to make PubSub+ Platform available via the cloud environments and marketplaces you already use – AWS marketplace for example, SAP Business Technology Platform as the foundation of their SAP Event Mesh Offering. We’ll also soon be available in the Azure and GCP marketplaces, and our software broker will be certified for Red Hat.
• Improving Cloud Ops & Deployment: We’ve introduced a wide range of new self-service capabilities that let you spin up, secure, and scale your PubSub+ Cloud event broker services all by yourself, giving you more control, lowering your costs and making it way easier to upgrade your brokers with things like self-upgrading PubSub+ Mission Control agents.
• Multi-Geography PubSub+ Cloud: For companies facing data sovereignty requirements, i.e. the need to make sure all data – including Cloud Console, Mission Control and Event Portal data – remains within their country or region, we now support the hosting of such data in region. The first region supported is Australia, and we will add support for other regions as needed.

After I introduced these features, Product Management Director Scott Lawrence demonstrated how easy it is to add a new event broker service to an event mesh, select hybrid connectivity, and validate the health of your event mesh. All of this was demonstrated in the context of a retailer adding a new product catalog application to the event mesh and updating product information across their system in real-time.

With Scott’s demo done, I pulled my Steve Jobsian “oh and one more thing” by introducing the next big thing that’s coming down the pike, i.e. the ability to run and manage your own instance of PubSub+ Event Portal in your own cloud or on-prem environment, as an alternative to today’s completely SaaS model.

Watch the “Easier to Deploy” section of the webcast.

Easier to Integrate

In the realm of enterprise computing “no environment is an island,” so one of the keys to implementing EDA in a way that serves your entire enterprise is integrating PubSub+ Platform with all of your cloud services, integration tools and more. You can watch the on-demand version of this part of the webcast here, and here’s a description of what we covered on this front:

• New MuleSoft Connector: You’ve always been able to integrate PubSub+ Platform with any iPaaS using JMS, but a year or so ago we introduced a native connector for Boomi that makes it way easier, and gives you access to more features and message exchange patterns. We’ve just announced a similar connector for MuleSoft Anypoint Platform that you don’t even need to download – find it in Anypoint Exchange, fill out some parameters and go – that even lets you find and import events and import schemas from PubSub+ Event Portal to populate Mule message payload definitions, and more! Principal Product Manager Andrew MacKenzie then demonstrated how easy it is to integrate event-driven applications such as an update to a retailer’s product catalog with a reseller’s catalog using the combination of the integrated platform MuleSoft with PubSub+.
• New & Improved RDPs: For a while now we’ve given you the ability to integrate cloud services in an event-driven manner using REST delivery points (RDPs) directly from our broker, but recently we’ve released cloud service-specific wizards for AWS, Azure, and Google services – like functions and storage – that walk you through the steps it takes to deliver events to popular cloud-native services without any coding.
• New GO API: Another addition to our stable of integration tools is a GO API that’s about to be released for early access. If you’re interested, go to the Developer Community and sign up for our EA program today!
• New Support for Event API Products within PubSub+ Event Portal: As EDA becomes an integral element of how more enterprises run their business, the need to expose high-value events, many of which are the by-product of many other events, to internal and external stakeholders becomes increasingly important. PubSub+ Event Portal now supports the creation and management of event API products so you can treat your events like data products, just like you do for API products.

But wait there’s more…

My “one more thing” moment for the “easier to integrate” section was a doozy – we’re making it easier to integrate PubSub+ Platform with Apache Kafka by baking the capabilities of our external source and sink Kafka connectors right into our event broker. This means you’ll be able to establish bi-directional streaming between your event mesh and a Kafka cluster without deploying any extra software – just configure a new connector in the Solace broker and you’re good to go.

Watch the “Easier to Integrate” section of the webcast.

Easier to Manage

It’s not the sexiest aspect of implementing EDA, but the ability to manage and monitor an event mesh, while meeting important data governance requirements, is where the rubber meets the real-world road. That’s why we continue to invest heavily in making it easier for you to keep your event mesh running at peak performance, 24x7x365. You can watch the on-demand version of this part of the webcast here, or read below for a description of what we covered:

• New Datadog-powered Dashboards: PubSub+ Insights gives you the operational visibility you need to avoid downtime and optimize performance, and we’ve taken it to a new level by introducing a number of pre-built and easily configurable dashboards that provide the key metrics, alerts and charts you need to run your event mesh.
  Scott Lawrence was back to demonstrate how PubSub+ Insights helped a retailer address a message spool issue with their Ecommerce queue due to a Christmas promotion being launched.
• Role-based Access Control in Event Portal: One of the areas in which we’ve improved the manageability of information in Event Portal is giving you the ability to grant viewer, editor or manager roles to individual users so you can govern who has what type of access to your EDA design information.
• Event Portal Lifecycle management: As you develop your EDA applications you promote your software from dev to QA to pre-prod to prod, and you make changes to the events they produce and consume. So how do you track which version of which event is running in which cluster where?  That’s what the Event Portal’s lifecycle management capabilities will help you do.
• Leave the driving to us: The final piece of the “easier to manage” puzzle is the coup de grace – not managing and monitoring your event mesh, or, more accurately, trusting us to do it for you. Our VP of Customer Success and Services Dan Fossum broke down the latest and greatest we’ve got to offer in the area of outsourcing the operation of your event mesh to the experts who’ve built the technology itself, and/or specialize in deploying/operating it every day. Learn more about remote monitoring and management service​.

Yeah, you know the drill… one more thing!

Again I saved a good one for the postscript: the imminent evolution of event observability with distributed event tracing. If you work in a middleware team, you’ve been asked “Where’s my message?  I never received it!” And app developers always want to know what events were sent, where they went, where they didn’t go as part of debugging your distributed application.

Logs only go so far in answering these kinds of questions, so soon our event brokers will emit data in the Open Telemetry format so it can be captured and made available for search and visualization by applications in Solace Cloud and 3^rd-party OTel-conformant applications. Distributed event tracing will show you when a message was published, where it was enqueued, when it was delivered, acknowledged or rejected. This level of observability is going to totally change the game in terms of how you manage your event mesh, and will open up all kinds of cool capabilities.

Watch the “Easier to Manage” section of the webcast.

Summary

I think that’s about it… for real this time! If you’ve got any questions about the features and functions we’ve introduced or will be dropping soon, the best place to be part of the conversation with fellow users and our product experts is the Solace Developer Community so sign up today and dive in!