At the recent AWS Summit Event in New York, Amazon announced the general availability of Amazon EventBridge, a serverless event bus that allows AWS services, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and custom applications to communicate with each other using events.
With EventBridge customers can build and manage event-driven solutions by controlling the event ingestion, delivery, security, authorization, and error-handling in a central place. Furthermore, the service doesn’t require the customer to manage any infrastructure or scaling, and they only pay for the events their applications consume.
Amazon EventBridge shares the same event processing model that forms the basis for CloudWatch Events – and as Jeff Barr explains in a blog post about Amazon EventBridge, everything a customer knows about CloudWatch still applies with one addition:
In addition to the existing default event bus that accepts events from AWS services, and calls to PutEvents and from other authorized accounts, each partner application that you subscribe to will also create an event source that you can then associate with an event bus in your AWS account. You can select any of your event buses, create EventBridge Rules, and select Targets to invoke when an incoming event matches a rule.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/
Through the AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface (CLI), or SDK, customers can start with EventBridge and create a new event bus and receive events from SaaS applications. Subsequently, they can then create a rule to match events from a list of AWS services or SaaS applications and proceed to set up targets for their events.
Many companies that have gone "all in" on cloud technologies do not necessarily use the available operational services provided by a single cloud vendor. With EventBridge, Amazon can serve these customers with an opportunity to integrate their operations with third-party services like Zendesk, PagerDuty, and SignalFx.
Adrian McDermott, president of products, Zendesk, told InfoQ:
Businesses want to manage customer data in a way that works for them. However, developers often have their hands tied with legacy CRM solutions and cannot adequately manage events’ customer data. With the Zendesk Events Connector for Amazon EventBridge, businesses can easily stream data and events into popular AWS services such as S3, Redshift, Kinesis, and Sagemaker. This allows businesses to build on top of their customer data for the next wave of connected customer experiences.
Furthermore, more integrations with EventBridge are coming. On Reddit, in a thread around Amazon EventBridge release, a responded stated:
We’re working with a lot of other SaaS providers helping them to build integrations, and you’ll see new integrations show up in the console as we roll them out.
With EventBridge, companies can automate specific tasks such as allowing AWS Lambda to respond to particular events and perform a restart of a Virtual Machine, cleanse marketing data, or run particular business logic. This type of automation can enable companies to standardize their operations on AWS and is what Amazon hopes they will do. Amazon has set up a dedicated partner program for this purpose to encourage more SaaS providers to add integrations for their offerings.
Finally, Amazon is not the only public cloud provider with an Event service – Microsoft has already had a service available for quite some time called Azure Event Grid. Event Grid enables developers to manage events in a unified way in Azure, and doesn’t natively support SaaS integrations like EventBridge.
Currently, Amazon EventBridge is available in the following regions:
- Americas - US East (Ohio and N. Virginia), US West (Oregon and N. California), Canada (Central), and South America (Sao Paulo)
- Europe - Stockholm, Paris, Ireland, Frankfurt, and London
- Asia Pacific - Mumbai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Sydney
Amazon will start supporting more regions soon in China and Japan.
Lastly, Amazon will charge customers on the number of events published to the event buses in their account, billed at $1 for every million events. Note that Amazon will not charge for events published by AWS services. For pricing details, see the pricing page.