This is IBM Event Automation : a new product we released last month to help our clients create event driven solutions.
I’ve written a 200-word summary of what IBM Event Automation is, but in this post I wanted to dive a little bit deeper and show what it can do.
A summary of IBM Event Automation in under 200 words.
Last week was the first release of IBM Event Automation. I’ve been asked what it’s all about, so I thought it’d be helpful to have a brief summary to point people at.
IBM Event Automation is a collection of three components, designed to help companies be productive in creating event-driven solutions.
This is a talk I gave at Kafka Summit last month. It was an introduction to the Java APIs for Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams, using data from Xbox to bring the examples to life.
Confluent require personal details to watch recordings from Kafka Summit – sorry
It’s easy for developers who aren’t immersed in all-things-Kafka to assume that “Apache Kafka” just means an event backbone: something that hosts topics (and perhaps the client libraries to produce and consume messages using those topics). But Kafka is more than that. It is an ecosystem of tools that enables a complete event-streaming application.
That was the premise of this talk, recorded at Devoxx UK, which I gave to a room of Java developers. I introduced them to two other bits of Kafka: Kafka Connect (for getting data in and out of Kafka topics from external systems) and Kafka Streams (for developing stream processing applications).
Because they were Java developers, I thought the best way to give them a flavour of these tools was to show them the APIs, and walk through an example solution made using the APIs.
The example solution used Kafka tools to process data from Xbox – mostly because I’m a gamer and it made for a fun, if silly, demo.
A recording of a demo walkthrough I did about using the Kafka Connect MQ connectors to flow messages between IBM MQ and Apache Kafka.
A few weeks ago, I presented a session at TechCon about IBM MQ and Apache Kafka with David Ware. I spent most of my time running through how to use Kafka Connect with IBM MQ, with a few demos showing different ways to setup and run the kafka-connect-mq-source Connector.
My demos start at around 20 minutes in, but you should listen to David give the context first!
In this post, I want to highlight a feature that I often see under-used in IBM Event Streams, and show how you can easily give it a try.
Kafka can enforce quotas to limit the impact that client applications can have on your cluster. To quote the Kafka documentation:
It is possible for producers and consumers to produce/consume very high volumes of data or generate requests at a very high rate and thus monopolize broker resources, cause network saturation and generally DOS other clients and the brokers themselves.
Having quotas protects against these issues and is all the more important in large multi-tenant clusters where a small set of badly behaved clients can degrade user experience for the well behaved ones.
In fact, when running Kafka as a service this even makes it possible to enforce API limits according to an agreed upon contract.
How to run a tiny local Kafka cluster using IBM Event Streams images
For local development on Kafka projects, I always run the public open source builds of ZooKeeper and Kafka as Java processes directly on my laptop (similar to steps described in the Apache Kafka Quickstart).
But for a project this week, I needed to verify something with the distribution of Kafka that comes with IBM Event Streams.
I used a simple Docker Compose setup for this. I’ll use this post to share how I did it.
I’ve made a Kafka Connect source connector for sending “real-time” events from Xbox LIVE to Kafka topics.
Quick primer if you’re not a gamer or don’t know what I’m talking about!
The Xbox platform comes with a social aspect: details about games you play and the achievements you earn playing them, are shared with your friends on the Xbox LIVE service. That is the source of data I’m using here.
Create an API key for your Xbox LIVE account, and run the Connector with it, and it will start producing two streams of events to your Kafka cluster:
Screenshot from Event Streams, but as a Kafka Connect connector, you could use any flavour of Kafka, including Apache Kafka.
ACHIEVEMENTSPRESENCE
Events when your friends start playing a game, or go online/offline.
Details about the attributes of each of these events can be found in the Connector README, but here are a few screenshots to give you an idea.
An example message on the ACHIEVEMENTS topic.
