A real-time look at event-driven architecture

API Management—and specifically event-driven architecture (EDA)—is a critical piece of a hybrid integration platform (HIP). Event-driven API management continues to gain importance due to the growth in deployment of solutions that create or leverage “events” including IoT, blockchain, mobile, and microservices.

What is event-driven architecture?

Event-driven architecture is the new buzzword, but what exactly is EDA? TechTarget defines it as a  “framework that orchestrates behavior around the production, detection, and consumption of events and the responses they evoke. An event is any identifiable occurrence that has significance for system hardware or software.¹”

A significant differentiator for event-driven API Management is that it enables integration and application leaders to evolve beyond REST APIs, which are request-response, to now support real-time and event-driven use cases. I have found that the best way to understand EDA is to understand how streaming is being used in real life today. Let’s look at an example from the finance industry.

Brokers rely heavily on market data and need the most up-to-date data as possible. Market data becomes obsolete in a matter of minutes and trading on old data can have catastrophic ramifications.

By converting to streaming technology and saving even 10ms on getting market data in real-time can be worth up to $8m/year for a broker.² We live in a world where we all expect real-time data and your customers are no different. Real-time should mean real-time, not almost real-time.

There is a lot to learn from the most successful API providers out there, and it pays to check in on what the leaders are up to when it comes to event-driven approaches to operating API platforms. There are five providers we like to think of as API rock stars:

• Twilio—real-time SMS, voice, and push technology for messaging applications
• SendGrid—real-time email push technology for transactional messaging applications
• Stripe—real-time payment push technology for driving commerce applications
• GitHub—real-time infrastructure push technology to orchestrate systems
• Slack—real-time chat and message push technology for orchestrating collaboration

Benefits of Event-Driven Architecture

1. Better data for your customers: Real-time data means that they have access to more accurate data and can make better business decisions for their enterprise. This gives additional opportunities for growth and to develop themselves as the expert and authority of that data to their clients.
2. Lower costs and bandwidth constraints: Because the polling madness stops and in return, you are only requesting data when it changes and only that data is being pushed through to the end-user, customers are less likely to hit limitations and incur restrictions that lead to additional costs.
3. Highly scalable and flexible: Event-driven architecture scales well to a very large number of users and allows new services to be added without breaking the streams of data that are currently deployed.

If you are interested in finding more use cases and other API providers that are excelling in their event-driven architecture, check out the API Gallery.

Axway recently acquired Streamdata.io, adding capabilities to AMPLIFY that will support customers in their digital transformation journey and adoption. The addition of event-driven API support coupled with Axway microservices and service mesh will advance our customers’ capabilities and help them reach their goals of operating event-driven architecture so they can provide their clients’ real-time data efficiently.