5 Things to Know About Event-Driven APIs and Apache Kafka

Blog: The Tibco Blog

APIs are becoming the crux of any digital business today. They provide a multitude of internal and external uses, including making B2B connections and linking building blocks for low-code application development and event-driven thinking. Digital business can’t exist without event-driven thinking. There are real benefits to developing event-driven apps and architecture—to provide a more responsive and scalable customer experience.

Your digital business requires new thinking. New tools are required to adopt event-driven architecture. This includes being able to implement tools such as Kafka, Project Flogo^®, and event-driven APIs. That said, if you’re not adopting event-driven APIs, you’re leaving revenue, innovation, and customer engagement opportunities on the table.

Here are five things to know about how Kafka and event-driven APIs that can benefit your business.

Offer a wide range of benefits and use cases for businesses

When it comes to the implementation of event-driven architecture, specifically, event-driven APIs, there are a number of benefits for digital businesses. Event-driven APIs are able to deliver real-time responsiveness, support microservices for optimal agility, and enable scalability. Additionally, Kafka provides the processing of high-speed event streams, which can invoke event-driven APIs and services. This allows for a number of business use cases in a wide variety of industries such as telecom, financial services, and travel. Examples of specific use cases include creating personalized offers, developing scalable engagement, and supporting the customer journey.

Combat roadblocks that are commonly found in adopting an event-driven architecture

With the development of event-driven architecture, developers and businesses face a number of roadblocks. A few common roadblocks are:

The need for service execution and iteration to be loosely coupled from one another to deliver more agility
A way to manage interactions between events and microservices
A standard specification for communication

Luckily, event-driven APIs help combat these roadblocks. The interoperability between loosely coupled services, microgateways for protection and mediation between events and microservices, and a defacto standard make event-driven APIs attractive to developers.

Made possible by the rapid adoption of cloud

The rapid adoption and use of cloud have made event-driven architecture and tools more widely available, as a managed service and in public or private clouds. This has allowed developers to work across their systems in multiple programming languages, leverage microservices, access multiple databases, and to deploy as a function-as-a-service (FaaS).

Can be built with the help of an open-source framework

Developers are turning to a more open-source offering to build successful event-driven architecture and APIs. Apache Kafka is an open-source event stream-processing platform with the goal to provide a highly scalable platform for handling real-time data feeds. TIBCO provides enterprise support for Kafka via TIBCO^® Messaging. A tool such as Flogo can be leveraged for event-driven application development as it’s lighter than Java or Node.js, supports an event-driven microgateway, can be deployed as a serverless function, via containers, or edge IoT, and offers machine learning capabilities. Alternatively, AsyncAPI offers an open-source API specification which has become the defacto standard for event-driven APIs. It also supports event-driven microservices, IoT, and streaming APIs.

Scalable to increase the volume, velocity, and variety of data for decision-making

One of the major trends when it comes to data usage and consumption is the increase in volume, velocity, and variety of data used for decision-making. This is reflected in a paradigm shift for developers, embracing new event-driven architecture, specifically event-driven APIs, at scale. What’s more, is that Kafka plays a key role as a hyper-scale, high-speed processor of streaming event data. Developers are now able to handle large volumes of streaming events with ease.

We’ve worked with developer-focused analyst firm Redmonk to better explain the challenges, opportunities, and tools available to adopt and event-driven architecture, including Kafka and event-driven APIs. Watch the webinar to learn why more and more developers are turning to event-driven APIs.