IBM® Event Automation’s event endpoint management capability makes it easy to describe and document your Kafka topics (event sources) according to the open source AsyncAPI Specification.
Why is this important? AsyncAPI already fuels clarity, standardization, interoperability, real-time responsiveness and beyond. Event endpoint management brings this to your ecosystem and helps you seamlessly manage the complexities of modern applications and systems.
The immense utility of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and API management are already widely recognized as it enables developers to collaborate effectively, which helps them to discover, access and build on existing solutions. As events are used for communication between applications, these same benefits can be delivered by formalizing event-based interfaces:
- Describing events in a standardized way: Developers can quickly understand what they are and how to consume them
- Event discovery: Interfaces can be added to catalogs, so they are advertised and searchable
- Decentralized access: Self-service access with trackable use for interface owners
- Lifecycle management: Interface versioning to ensure teams are not unexpectedly broken by changes
Becoming event driven has never been more important as customers demand immediate responsiveness and businesses need ways to quickly adapt to changing market dynamics. Thus, events need to be fully leveraged and spread across the organization in order for businesses to truly move with agility. This is where the value of event endpoint management becomes evident: event sources can be managed easily and consistently like APIs to securely reuse them across the enterprise; and then they can be discovered and utilized by any user across your teams.
One of the key benefits of event endpoint management is that it allows you to describe events in a standardized way according to the AysncAPI specification. With its intuitive UI, it makes it easy to produce a valid AsyncAPI document for any Kafka cluster or system that adheres to the Apache Kafka protocol.
Our AsycnAPI applicability is broadening in our implementation. Our latest event endpoint management release introduces the ability for client applications to write to an event source through the event gateway. This now means an application developer can produce to an event source that is published to the catalog, rather than just consume events. On top of this, we have provided controls such as schema enforcement to manage the kind of data a client can write to your topic.
Alongside providing self-service access to these event sources found in the catalog, we provide those finer grained approval controls. Access to the event sources is managed by the event gateway functionality: the event gateway handles the incoming requests from applications to access a topic, routing traffic securely between the Kafka cluster and the application.
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Since its inception, Event Endpoint Management has adopted and promoted AsyncAPI, which is the industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs. AsyncAPI version 3 was released in December last year and within a couple of weeks, IBM supported generating those v3 AsynchAPI docs in event endpoint management. Additionally, as part of giving back to the open-source community, IBM updated the open source AsyncAPI generator templates to support the latest version 3 updates. Check out our talk on AsyncAPI v3 and how to easily make use of those AsyncAPI generator templates. IBM continues to support and sponsor the AsyncAPI community, continuing our goal to make to make asynchronous APIs more manageable, user-friendly and easily accessible. Find out more below.
Learn more about event endpoint management:
Check out our talk at the Kafka Summit
Learn more about IBM Event Automation
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