Event-driven architecture (EDA) has become more crucial for organizations that want to strengthen their competitive advantage through real-time data processing and responsiveness. Being event-driven not only enhances agility and scalability, but also empowers businesses to swiftly adapt to changing market conditions, deliver personalized customer experiences and use actionable insights derived from continuous streams of data. However, businesses that aim to grow and thrive in our increasingly digital economy are also faced with handling and processing higher volumes of data without driving up costs and sacrificing security. 

In recognizing the benefits of event-driven architectures, many companies have turned to Apache Kafka for their event streaming needs. Apache Kafka enables scalable, fault-tolerant and real-time processing of streams of data—but how do you manage and properly utilize the sheer amount of data your business ingests every second? Thousands of events are constantly running through your business and those events often contain integral information that can enhance business operations and fuel innovation if your teams use them properly. But how do you manage and scale the most valuable use of your events?

Management capabilities to democratize your events

The need for proper governance and controls grows as the looming presence of cyberattacks clouds organizations. Businesses need to find a way to continue operating securely, without overlooking the need to be data-driven to stay ahead of the curve. Real-time responsiveness is crucial when customers have the power to turn to competitors who can meet their needs faster. The ability to drive real-time events across your business can quickly become a significant differentiator. This begs the question: how do you manage your events and increase reach across your business, while also adhering to proper governance and controls?

IBM® Event Automation’s event endpoint management capability has been making the discovery and management of events just as easily as APIs. It has allowed users to discover and self-service access to events that are relevant to their team operations. However, this impressive capability does not allow just anyone to access any sort of information as they please. Instead, it enables Kafka administrators to provide additional security controls to streams of events and publish them to an easily searchable catalog that can be used in real time real-time across the business.

Fuel innovation safely with the event gateway and event catalog

The event endpoint management capabilities enhance existing Kafka and EDA investments by accelerating these event-driven efforts through event discovery, socialization and security. It allows for events to be described in a standardized way using the AsyncAPI specification that is published in an easily searchable catalog and advertised for users to self-service access relevant topics with applied controls and gateway enforcement.

At the event gateway level, Kafka administrators can apply controls like redaction, schema enforcement and schema filtering. Additionally, the event gateway removes the need to set up access control lists for every application, which helps developers free up their time and not get bogged down with constant security concerns. This is but one of the many benefits for application developers already using Kafka, as it enables easy security mechanisms across topics on multiple clusters, self-onboarding for access to topics and reduced disruption during Kafka administration—all at the Kafka protocol level to transparently apply enforcement policies.

The searchable event catalog provides easy topic discovery and self-service access with the click of a button. Key information such as a description, examples of what data is on the topic, the schema and contact information for the topic owner, all make it a great experience for developers to easily find and understand event topics that are relevant to their use case. There is no doubt that innovation flows best when people have the freedom to explore and the catalog with self-service access provides just that. In the background, topic managers can easily track accessible topics and remove any subscriptions that are no longer required, promoting a constant state of governance over business data.

Keep it simple: work with API Connect

Event endpoint management stays aligned to open source and composable principles, which allow users to easily work with their existing technology stack. Let’s consider another impressive IBM product: IBM API Connect®, well-known and loved for its comprehensive API management capabilities. Event endpoint management allows users to export AsyncAPI documents for building applications or importing into API Connect, creating a comprehensively documented interface with code samples and example responses. 

When working with APIC, you can have a common portal to manage and discover all your APIs and events in one place. Using the latest versions of event endpoint management with API Connect (APIC 10.0.8 and EEM 11.2), you can now generate and import a new AsyncAPI document from a configured event endpoint management instance into API Connect in a single step. All you need to do is select the AsyncAPI from your event gateway service that you want to import and the AsyncAPI definition is generated and created in API Connect, ready to add to the developer portal alongside your other events and APIs. With event endpoint management, you can control access to any of your topics of events, and you can also control what data can be produced to them or consumed from them.

Bring governance to the forefront of your EDA

The popularity surge in event-driven architectures is undeniable, but the surge in business events flowing through enterprises brings governance and discovery challenges that must be addressed to properly scale your EDA. Without control, it can become practically impossible to scale-up your EDA: you’ll spend more time putting out fires rather than leveraging the valuable information flowing within your business events. 

The event endpoint management team from IBM Event Automation is hosting a webinar on 27 August 2024 to dive deeper into the values and benefits that stem from proper governance and event management with the AsyncAPI specification. Register to attend today and come with questions to learn more on how event management is critical for your organization’s EDA strategy.