Amazon EventBridge: An event bus with higher security and speed to boost AWS serverless ecosystem

Last week, Amazon had a pretty huge news for its AWS serverless ecosystem, one which is being considered as the biggest thing since AWS Lambda itself. Few days ago, with an aim to help customers integrate their own AWS applications with Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, Amazon EventBridge was launched.

The EventBridge model is an asynchronous, fast, clean, and easy to use event bus which can be used to publish events, specific to each AWS customer. The SaaS application and a code running on AWS are now independent of a shared communication protocol, runtime environment, or programming language. This allows Lambda functions to handle events from a Saas application as well as route events to other AWS targets.

Similar to CloudWatch events, EventBridge also has an existing default event bus that accepts events from AWS services and calls to PutEvents. One distinction between them is that in EventBridge, each partner application that a user subscribes to will also create an event source. This event source can then be used to associate with an event bus in an AWS account. AWS users can select any of their event buses, create EventBridge Rules, and select Targets to invoke when an incoming event matches a rule.

Important terms to understand the use of Amazon EventBridge

Partner: An organization that has integrated their SaaS application with EventBridge.

Customer: An organization that uses AWS, and that has subscribed to a partner’s SaaS application.

Partner Name: A unique name that identifies an Amazon EventBridge partner.

Partner Event Bus: An Event Bus that is used to deliver events from a partner to AWS.

How EventBridge works for partners & customers

A partner can allow their customers to enter an AWS account number and then select an AWS region. Next, CreatePartnerEventSource is called by the partner in the desired region and the customer is informed of the event source name.

After accepting the invitation to connect, customers have to wait for the status of the event source to change to Active. Each time an event of interest to the customer occurs, the partner calls the PutPartnerEvents and reference the event source.

Image Source: Amazon

It works the same way for customers as well. Customer accepts the invitation to connect by calling CreateEventBus, to create an event bus associated with the event source. Customer can add rules and targets to prepare the Lambda functions to process the events. Associating the event source with an event bus also activates the source and starts the flow of events. Customers can use DeActivateEventSource and ActivateEventSource to control the flow.

Amazon EventBridge is launched with ten partner event sources including Datadog, Zendesk, PagerDuty, Whispir, Segment, Symantec and more.

This is pretty big news for users who deal with building serverless applications. With inbuilt partner integrations these partners can directly trigger an event in an EventBridge, without the need for a webhook. Thus “AWS is the mediator rather than HTTP”, quotes Paul Johnston, the ServerlessDays cofounder.

He also adds that, “The security implications of partner integrations are the first thing that springs to mind. The speed implications will almost certainly be improved as well, with those partners almost certainly using AWS events at the other end as well.”

https://twitter.com/PaulDJohnston/status/1149629728065650693

https://twitter.com/PaulDJohnston/status/1149629729571397632

Users are excited with the kind of creative freedom Amazon EventBridge will bring to their products.

https://twitter.com/allPowerde/status/1149792437738622976

https://twitter.com/ShortJared/status/1149314506067255304

https://twitter.com/petrabarus/status/1149329981975040000

https://twitter.com/TobiM/status/1149911798256152576

Users with SaaS application can integrate with EventBridge Partner Integration.

Visit the Amazon blog to learn the implementation of EventBridge.

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