TIBCO Announces Support for Apache Kafka and MQTT via Eclipse Mosquito
Blog: The Tibco Blog
TIBCO now includes commercial support and services for Apache Kafka® and Eclipse Mosquitto™, as part of TIBCO® Messaging. Any businesses using these open source projects can now take advantage of enterprise-class, 24×7, follow-the-sun support for their messaging infrastructure.
The Evolution of TIBCO Messaging
TIBCO® Messaging continues to evolve and adapt to a growing need to share data between an ever-increasing number and variety of applications. Messaging initially emerged out of the need to increase the level of abstraction and decrease the dependencies shared between applications.
Today, as the messaging environment continues to mature, developers look to public and private cloud, to containers, to devices and an expanding number of use cases like log aggregation, machine generated data, and IoT data collection. Each of these use cases brings unique, and often, challenging requirements.
TIBCO recognizes the need to not only develop new and innovative messaging solutions, but also to enable anytime, anywhere messaging. With the addition of open-source software (OSS) support for Apache Kafka, and for MQTT via the Eclipse Mosquitto project, TIBCO Messaging is advancing the idea that different types of messaging, no matter the flavor, must be done efficiently, quickly, and reliably.
Customers now have access to the most comprehensive messaging portfolio in one seamlessly integrated platform, with a simple subscription model. The TIBCO Messaging solution covers all scenarios, including fully distributed, high-performance, peer-to-peer messaging, certified JMS messaging, web and mobile messaging, streaming messaging via Apache Kafka, and IoT messaging via MQTT and Eclipse Mosquitto. All these capabilities are backed by TIBCO’s industry-leading messaging expertise, innovation, and enterprise-class, 24×7, “follow-the-sun” support.
TIBCO and Open Source
This announcement further underscores TIBCO’s continued efforts in the open-source community. TIBCO is already a publisher of multiple open-source solutions, such as TIBCO Jaspersoft® (for embedded analytics), Project Flogo® (for edge microservices), and Project Mashling™ (for event-driven APIs). This announcement demonstrates how TIBCO is supporting popular open-source projects, to help increase awareness, support for, and usage of these projects within large enterprises across the globe. TIBCO’s messaging developers will contribute to the Apache Kafka and Eclipse Mosquitto projects over time, as they work with customers and community members.
Integrating Apache Kafka with the TIBCO Ecosystem
Apache Kafka has been growing in popularity. While often used as a method of log aggregation, Apache Kafka is making new inroads in other areas such as streaming, distributed systems, and commit logs. With the ever-present requirement to have integrated applications which share data, TIBCO is taking the next step to seamlessly integrate Kafka into the TIBCO ecosystem.
Prior to the availability of TIBCO® Messaging – Apache Kafka Distribution (in May 2018), if a developer wanted to make data published to Kafka available directly to applications not based on Kafka, they would build a custom bridge (such as a Flogo flow or TIBCO BusinessWorks™ process) that would take in Kafka messages and publish via another messaging service, for example, TIBCO Enterprise Message Service™ or TIBCO FTL®.
With the introduction of TIBCO Messaging – Apache Kafka Distribution, developers can now seamlessly bridge Apache Kafka into the TIBCO FTL platform. Through the TIBCO FTL platform, Kafka message streams can be extended into other messaging applications, such as web and mobile via TIBCO eFTL™, IoT through an MQTT broker, or JMS applications with TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, to name a few.
Integrating IoT with the TIBCO Messaging Ecosystem via MQTT
In the IoT space, there are several unique design considerations that must be taken into account. In addition to a small footprint, messaging solutions must handle intermittent network connectivity, handle billions of clients, and must limit network bandwidth utilization. The MQTT protocol was developed to address these unique types of requirements.
At the same time, on-premises, cloud, and container messaging services still have requirements like guaranteed delivery, dynamic formats, disaster recovery, low latency and high throughput. These requirements would potentially add unnecessary weight to protocols designed to fit the small footprint devices in the IoT space.
In order to bring these environments together and still respect the unique nature of each messaging landscape, TIBCO Messaging will include TIBCO® Messaging – Eclipse Mosquito Distribution, and an upcoming (May 2018) bridge that can “speak” both languages. An enterprise will be able to connect the lightweight MQTT protocol used by connected devices to a world-class, robust messaging protocol: TIBCO FTL. Using this bridge, developers will be able to bring the world of connected devices into the entire TIBCO ecosystem including Flogo, TIBCO BusinessWorks, TIBCO BusinessEvents®, and other TIBCO products.
Will TIBCO’s Apache Kafka and Eclipse Mosquitto distributions be different than the standard ones?
TIBCO will support the upstream Apache Kafka and Eclipse Mosquitto distributions. TIBCO will also provide an optimized distribution of Apache Kafka (in May 2018) with the removal of deprecated features.
What about message formatting or Avro?
Apache Avro™ is a serialization framework that is commonly used with Apache projects and by users of Apache Kafka. It can provide a convenient way to define schemas and format your message data. TIBCO will be providing a schema repository (in May 2018) which will allow client applications to create and manage schemas and message formats using Avro™. The schema repository will seamlessly integrate into an existing Apache Kafka project, and allow users to make use of Apache Avro for message schemas.
How will support be provided?
Apache Kafka and Eclipse Mosquitto will be supported by TIBCO’s 24×7 support, by a team with over 25 years of experience providing support for messaging and operations in 30 countries around the world. It also means that customers who currently get support for TIBCO Messaging also get support for the entire stack, including support for Apache Kafka and Eclipse Mosquitto. The messaging support staff are established and trusted experts in the field, dealing with issues ranging from the low-latency messaging solutions that power the world’s financial markets, to the high volumes of distributed messaging solutions that run the world’s largest retail operations, and everything in between.
Where can I learn more?
For further information on this release, please check out the following webinar: https://www.tibco.com/events/whats-new-messaging
To learn more about TIBCO Messaging, please visit: https://www.tibco.com/products/tibco-messaging
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