Solace, supplier of event-driven architecture (EDA) solutions for real-time enterprises, is announcing version 2.0 of PubSub+ Event Portal; a product geared towards alleviating pressure for architects and developers in regards to the design, lifecycle management, and governance of event streams and event-driven applications.
According to the company, EDA is a critical tool in increasing the agility of enterprises through real-time operations and customer interactions. Customers and partners alike demand real-time enterprise agility more than ever—responsiveness and continuous, accurate overviews of systems play valuable roles in efficient and successful operations. EDA and creating event meshes, or an internet of events for your enterprise, are the foundation for becoming real-time.
“Something can happen in your enterprise in one place, and that event can be digitally consumed somewhere else in your enterprise,” explained Shawn McAllister, CTO and CPO at Solace. “For example, when you open an account or acquire a customer, ship a product, when an order is placed, or inventory drops below a certain level—those are events. These are all things that are happening in your business that are of interest to people and to applications in your enterprise.”
Like many new strategies, EDA is not without some complications; in EDA, events are constantly flowing across their data meshes, introducing a realm of wide scale objects that require measurability and management to be best leveraged. Issues such as managing EDA assets’ lifecycles, asset cataloging, events within applications visualization, existing software development tool compatibility, event flow exposure, and inconsistency identification between design and deployment of systems are all symptoms of EDA expansion. Event Portal 2.0, however, targets these obstacles to foster best practices for EDAs through management, integration, exposure, and governance.
"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 McAllister. “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."
Event Portal 2.0 marries design, development, and deployment tools that otherwise proved to be a segmented and counterintuitive process for EDAs. With Solace’s multi-environment product, users can manage and control the lifecycles of applications, events, and schemas through creation to deployment and retirement, across development, test, and production stages. This results in improved responsiveness, agility, and compliance of event-driven applications for enhanced enterprise operations and service, according to the vendor. These functions will be available by the end of October.
Software development tools integration is expanded within this update; an assortment of open-source integration plugins for Event Portal 2.0 simplifies developer and architect workflows for enriched collaboration of application development and deployment. Plugins currently available for the product include Ansible, GitHub, IntelliJ, Jenkins, Postman, and Slack; Solace ensures that additional plugins will continue to be offered as the demand arises. Further, incorporation of a new AsyncAPI import tool enables users to integrate and develop with custom and third-party applications. The plugins and import tool will be available early 2023.
Exposure of API management information and capability is now possible for EDA applications with Event Portal 2.0, allowing application teams to concisely define event interfaces for data meshes, as well as other real-time integration use cases. Event Portal 2.0 highlights the flow of information for architects and developers—making event data properly discoverable, governed by who has access to it, and holistically ingested. Event APIs and event API products can be created, curated, cataloged, and shared for optimal event flow exposure and reusability. These capabilities will be made generally available by the end of October.
Event Portal 2.0’s open-source event management agent for identifying inconsistencies within existing Apache Kafka deployments, as well as AWS MSK clusters and PubSub+ brokers, equips enterprises with accurate system overviews. Via selective discovery and audit runtime configuration, users will be able to locate differences between the intent of design and the present configuration, increasing deployment time of applications and their respective updates. The agent provides a searchable catalog for EDA objects, as well as visualization within each environment. As an open-source agent, users can build plugins for data discovery from any event broker, allowing integration with desired tools. This functionality will be generally available in early 2023.
“For enterprises aspiring to be real-time and connected, you need to embrace an event-driven architecture. On top of that, you need an event-driven management capability, or you really can’t properly deal with the events flowing in your environment,” McAllister said. “Our event portal is intended to be multi-broker—today we work with multiple flavors of Kafka, AWS MSK, Confluence, and we’ll add more overtime—so you have one place to go to manage all of your event driven assets regardless of your event broker.”
To learn more about Solace’s Event Portal 2.0, please visit https://solace.com/.