Event Broker Definition:
An event broker is middleware software, appliance or SaaS used to transmit events between event producers and consumers in a publish-subscribe pattern.
According to Gartner, event brokers “are middleware products that are used to facilitate, mediate and enrich the interactions of sources and handlers in event-driven computing.”
“Event-driven architectures (EDA) is inherently intermediated. Therefore, the intermediating role of event brokering is a definitional part of EDA. All implementations of event-driven applications must use some technology in the role of an event broker.”*
How is an event broker different from a traditional message broker?
Traditional message brokers run on-premises and are wedded to a legacy ESB. Solace event brokers can be deployed in any and all your environments, on-prem and natively in your public and private clouds. They can be deployed alongside your iPaaS and in your PaaS. In short, they support the development of modern cloud native and event-driven apps and microservices.
What is an “advanced event broker”? What makes it advanced?
According to Gartner, “all event brokers must support the basic pub-sub logistics,” but those advanced ones that are designed to support event processing in the modern digital business environment offer significant additions, including some of the following:
- Integrity by ensuring guaranteed “exactly once,” “at most once,” or “at least once” delivery and ordering
- Event ledger by way of a permanent, append-only, immutable log of events. It is accessible as a data store for post-event analysis, machine learning, replay or event sourcing. In some cases, the event ledger may be used as the application’s record of truth
- Security at various levels of authentication, authorization and topic/channel access control
- Filtering of the data content of the event object schema to apply control, distribution compliance and other policies
- Transformation of the notification data to fit the schema of the channel
- Operational analytics to improve efficiency of operations
- Optimization of scaling to support the varying traffic density of certain event types through intelligent clustering
- Tracking and billing for monetizing public access to event notifications
- Resilience by supporting high availability and disaster recovery
- Contextualization by including historic and other relevant data in directing notifications
- Custom processing by supporting programmable logic add-ons
Next up: What is an event mesh?
*Gartner, Innovation Insight for Event Brokers, Yefim Natis, Keith Guttridge, W. Roy Schulte, Nick Heudecker, Paul Vincent, 31 July 2018