Event Horizon in 3 minutes

Get up to speed on what Event Horizon is, and why it’s important.

The challenge: event-driven architectures are hard to adopt today

Despite the widely recognized value of event-driven interactions, many architects and developers continue to use synchronous, RESTful request/reply interactions for all communications between applications. This is in large part because REST is supported and surrounded by a robust developer community, API specifications, development frameworks, and tools such as code generators which don’t exist in the area of events and event-driven applications. Event Horizon represents a commitment from Solace and likeminded companies and communities to address this.

Here’s a glimpse into our thinking:

-> Why is it so difficult to develop event-driven applications today?

-> Replicating the Success of REST in Event-Driven Architecture

-> An API Strategist Explores Event-Driven APIs

The solution: a path to mass EDA adoption

To unlock the power and potential of event-driven architectures, enterprises need:

  • A way to manage the creation, discovery, streaming and full life-cycle of events across distributed enterprises
  • Thought leadership and hands-on tips for designing event-driven microservices, APIs and architectures
  • Key commercial vendors collaborating to enable event-driven integration across proprietary applications, services and equipment
  • A vibrant and open community contributing code, developing frameworks, and sharing learnings across domains and use cases

Event Horizon will meet these needs through the following four initiatives:

  • 1. Launching the market’s first event management platform
  • 2. Driving a community-building, thought leadership and training program called Event Academy
  • 3. Forming strategic partnerships with leading enablers of enterprise-scale event-driven systems
  • 4. Contributing to open source development frameworks like AsyncAPI and Spring Cloud Stream

1. The market’s first event management platform

Why an Event Management Platform?

Event-driven applications and architectures will only be transformational to businesses when we have the tools to manage events the way we manage APIs. Documenting, discovering, registering and co-creating events and applications is key, but it’s not possible today. The market’s first complete event management platform will allow enterprises to be integrated and event-driven by providing:

Advanced event brokers

To power the event mesh, an architectural layer for streaming events across distributed enterprises.

An integration layer

To enable the seamless on and off-ramping of various event sources and sinks.

An event portal

For event design, definition and discovery.

A cloud console

To deploy and monitor event brokers, build event meshes, visualize the choreography of events across the distributed enterprise, and to fully leverage and continually optimize the health and performance of an event-driven system.

A few related reads

Service Mesh, Meet Event Mesh: The Architecture Layer for the Event-Driven Enterprise

Read More

Aiming at the Horizon: How Solace is Enabling the Age of Events

Read More

API Management, Meet Event Management

Read More

2. Event Academy

Many of the enterprise architects and developers we speak with tell us they’re keen to embrace event-driven microservices and architectures, but that they are either unsure where to start or are well under way but running into challenges. Today, we jump on calls to answer these questions, sharing best practices we’ve developed thanks to a decade of helping clients adopt and optimize event-driven architectures across distributed systems. Moving forward, we want to share these experiences and best practices more broadly with the community, and enable others to do the same. Event Academy will be an online community to learn and share best-practices surrounding the development of event-driven microservices and architectures. Learning material will include blogs and case studies, on-demand webcasts and workshops, documentation, code samples and more.

Our customer base and field team includes the world’s foremost experts on event-driven architecture…

…architects who have designed the most robust, highest volume event distribution systems in the world, and built event-driven applications that deliver tremendous value in capital markets, connected vehicles, smart cities and more. Event Academy will connect those individuals with the broader enterprise IT community so other architects and developers can become experts in event-driven development practices.”

Jonathan Schabowsky

Jonathan Schabowsky Sr Architect, Office of the CTO,

3. Forming partnerships to build better solutions

For enterprises to deploy and fully leverage the benefits of event-driven architectures, they need to deploy a variety of application, integration and event streaming technologies, both commercial and open source. Solace is committed to partnering with leading providers of event-related services and technologies to deliver better joint solutions. We recently announced a platinum sponsorship of AsyncAPI, a coalition comprised of developers and industry leaders working to create an industry standard for defining asynchronous, event-driven APIs in a machine-readable format. With this sponsorship, we join fellow sponsors MuleSoft, Salesforce, SAP, Slack and TIBCO.

Read the press release

4. Contributing to open source communities and development frameworks

The final Event Horizon initiative is the contribution of time, resources and code to open source developer communities and development frameworks like AsyncAPI and Spring Cloud Stream, which are critical components of the event-driven landscape. We’ve provided a Spring Cloud Stream binder that lets Spring applications connect to a Solace-based event mesh. We’re also developing a Spring Cloud Stream code generator for the AsyncAPI community so developers can quickly and easily reap the rewards of event-driven architecture.
-> View the Spring Cloud Stream Binder: GitHub | Maven
-> View the Spring Cloud Stream Workshops: GitHub | CodeLab