Have you been using Kafka and been really excited about the progress you were making,
but wondering, "Hey, how can I scale this usage out on a much larger scale?"
Well, if so, you're going to love our topic today on Event Endpoint Management.
Hello, my name is Jamil Spain, IBM Developer Advocate and Brand Technical Specialist in the US financial services market.
To cover the topic of event endpoint management, I wanted to bring out 4 major tips that you can use,
which really encompasses the discipline of describing and managing your event topics here.
So we're going to start off by filling these in and we will discuss these points as we go.
The first is that these event topics need to be described.
Now there's a specification called the AsyncAPI, which is the, pretty much, the industry standard on
how to describe topics as events, which is the industry standard here.
And what it really aims to do is give events the same comfort as we have grown to love with APIs.
And, let's face it, now developers will want to implement APIs, but they love to have that kind of that swagger interface
and they can quickly go ahead and and start to go.
Which brings me to my next point.
Events should be discoverable.
And what this entails is kind of the catalog format of having all the events in one place tagged with a taxonomy,
so it's easy for me to search, and cataloged in a very presentable for me to actually
go in and read the specification for.
Again, another great trend that we're used to for a lot of API developer portals.
The fourth, we're going to say, is you should have ...
so I'll say that you have decentralized access here.
So what this pretty much says is people should be free to explore.
All right.
The innovation usually comes where I'm free to kind of go out and use it at my own comfort.
I kind of equivocate it to like when I'm on Netflix, I get to browse the catalog and really find the movies as I want to go.
Kind of getting my own rabbit hole here.
Some of the trends that go along with that is the capability to be self-service, where I get to register my applications
and truly have some way to have trackable usage on what I'm using, getting that feedback there as well.
And the last is
decoupled access.
So we really want to find a way that's very scalable and less fragile.
Again, the information or Kafka as a whole, the process of providing access to event topics should not really impede
on how I'm forced to implement it here.
And so by putting this interface in front, that will really give me a scalable way that I can expose access to this
and still accomplish what I'm trying to do inside my architecture here.
So hopefully that describes the general arena of managing events and the things you need to
pay attention to and watch out for.
Let's move over to the right and do a little diagram about really depicting what it looks like and how it works.
So for this, let's start out with our usual diagram that everyone knows with this how API management works.
And again, we already know that APIs get socialized, let's say I am a user
and I'm sitting at my laptop and I'm going to be looking at a developer portal.
We'll call that acronym there "DP".
And then there's the concept of a gateway.
All right, API gateway and...
now, as I browse in the developer portal, I see something that I want to subscribe to, basically when I go to implement,
I'm going to be actually going consuming through the API gateway.
And as we know, it has an interface to go out and hit some other backend service as is.
So that's a normal practice that's always there.
Again, all the APIs are described in the developer portal.
But let's put these particular initiatives to work here.
When event endpoint management comes into play (let's switch our marker here),
so with events...
we're still going to have the same developer portal here.
A portal that describes in list all our particular events as they go.
And we're also going to have the concept of a gateway.
So let's call it the "EV", the event gateway.
All right, so as I am still being the user, let's take the same user, so they're looking at APIs and alongside that, they have access
to also browse topics here, a third tier that they can do, which will then as they go to consume these, will go through
the API gateway and then be able to..
consume from Kafka there.
And provide the particular information back as they would do.
So, by using the developer portal, developers get to quickly scale up and be able to look at the events that are there and know,
be able to test it out quickly and permit and get going.
And as you become your Kafka or become Kafka as a service or a very Kafka first environment where you want to expose a lot
of data directly through event topics, this is a great way with event endpoint management
to really get that program going and facilitate that.
So thank you for your time.
Hope that was very useful in your in your use of Kafka here.
And I look forward to hearing your stories about how you'll be using event endpoint management in your architecture.
Thank you.
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