Latest release transforms the way architects and developers design, lifecycle manage, and govern event-driven APIs and applications across a variety of brokers, including Solace, Apache Kafka, Confluent and Amazon MSK
Solace, the leading enabler of event-driven architecture for real-time enterprises, today announced version 2.0 of PubSub+ Event Portal, the first-of-its-kind product that created the event management category in 2020.
Enterprises worldwide are embracing event-driven architecture (EDA) to become more agile and real-time in their operations and customer interactions. Expanding their use of EDA has come with many challenges, most notably:
- managing the complete lifecycle of EDA assets, such as applications, events, and schemas
- finding a way to catalog the assets for reuse
- visualizing how events flow from application to application
- making it easy for developers to collaborate and leverage EDA with existing software development tools
- exposing event flows for use and reuse via APIs
- identifying discrepancies between designs and deployed systems that have evolved in production
Event Portal 2.0 addresses these challenges, making it easier for architects and developers to design, lifecycle manage and govern event streams and event-driven applications across popular event brokers like Apache Kafka, including Confluent and Amazon MSK, as well as Solace’s own product, PubSub+ Event Broker.
Forrester advises that organizations should “implement governance and lifecycle management for event streams. As they grow in importance, you can include enterprise business events in the portfolio management you should already have in place for APIs. Establish an event portal where users of event streams can discover events, understand their functionality, and subscribe.”*
New Lifecycle Management Capabilities
Until now, there hasn’t been a single tool for managing applications, events, schemas and objects from design through development, test, and production. Architects and developers have made do with one set of tools for design, another set for development and yet another for deployment.
Event Portal 2.0 provides new lifecycle management and version control capabilities that enable application teams to more efficiently manage applications, events, schemas and other objects from creation to deployment, and evolution over time through to retirement. It does so, in part, by supporting multiple environments so application teams can visualize, catalog and model event streams and event-driven applications across their development, test and production environments.
Collectively, these new lifecycle management capabilities help enterprises improve the agility, compliance and responsiveness of their event-driven applications so their lines of businesses can operate at peak performance, and provide their customers the best possible service.
The lifecycle management capabilities described above will be generally available by the end of October.
Easier Integration with Software Development Tools
Developers work with a variety of tools that are disconnected from the event management environments used by architects. This disconnect makes it difficult for enterprise architects to collaborate, and forces developers to cut-and-paste from catalogs.
A family of new open-source integration plugins for popular software development tools makes it easier for developers and architects to collaborate on the development and deployment of event-driven applications. Plugins are initially available for Ansible, GitHub, IntelliJ, Jenkins, Postman and Slack, and additional plugins will be made available based on demand. Deeper integration and development of custom and third-party applications can also be accomplished by a new AsyncAPI import tool.
The plugins and AsyncAPI import tool will be available in early 2023.
New Ability to Create Event APIs
One of the benefits of API management is that you can expose capabilities and information across your organization and beyond – even monetizing it. This is the basis for what has come to be known as the API economy. Unfortunately, to date there hasn’t been an easy way to do so for event-driven applications and data streams.
Event Portal 2.0 enables application teams to more formally define event interfaces for data meshes and other real-time integration use cases by letting them create, curate, catalog and share event APIs and event API products, which are packaged sets of multiple event streams that collectively perform a complex service. This ability empowers enterprises to expose event flows to internal and external constituents so they can reuse them, and potentially monetize their use through chargebacks or license fees.
The ability to create event APIs and event API products will be generally available end of October.
New Runtime Discovery and Auditing Capabilities
After a design is deployed, changes often get made and it is difficult for architects and developers to know how the deployed version varies from the original design. For existing Kafka deployments, many struggle to gain a complete view of what topics, schemas and applications have been deployed to which of their Kafka clusters.
Event Portal 2.0 includes an event management agent that enables application teams to selectively discover and audit runtime configuration within their Apache Kafka, Confluent and AWS MSK clusters, along with PubSub+ brokers. These capabilities accelerate the process of deploying new and updated applications by quickly and easily identifying discrepancies between the intent of the design and the actual configuration using a continuously accurate view of their systems. These EDA objects are searchable in a catalog and can be visualized within each environment. The agent is open-sourced, enabling teams to build plugins to discover data from any event broker to document their systems and integrate with their tools of choice.
The ability to discover and audit runtime data along with the open-sourcing of the event management agent will be generally available in early 2023.
Market Leadership
The launch of Event Portal 2.0 is yet another milestone in Solace’s Event Horizon initiative, geared to helping businesses adopt, manage and leverage event-driven architecture at enterprise scale.
“Solace pioneered the event management space with the initial launch of PubSub+ Event Portal in 2020. This helped accelerate the adoption of event-driven architecture by giving large and distributed enterprises the toolset they need to design and manage a variety of event-driven applications and event streams at scale,” said Shawn McAllister, CTO and CPO, Solace. “Since then, we’ve worked closely with customers, analysts and partners to understand how they use and benefit from the product, and what more they wanted from it, and PubSub+ Event Portal 2.0 is our answer to their invaluable feedback.”
* Source: Forrester Research “Use Event-Driven Architecture in Your Quest for Modern Applications”, David Mooter, April 9 2021
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