Posts Tagged ‘asyncapi’

Accelerating your event-driven projects with AsyncAPI 3

Thursday, March 21st, 2024

Demonstrating some of the first tools to support AsyncAPI v3, and how they can help accelerate your event-driven projects.

AsyncAPI version 3 was released in December 2023. In this post, I want to share some of the things that you can do with AsyncAPI v3 documents, with a demonstration of:

  • Event Endpoint Management
    Download AsyncAPI documents for Kafka topics shared for reuse
    AsyncAPI v3 support added in version 11.1.1 (Dec 2023)
  • AsyncAPI java-template
    Generate complete Java projects from AsyncAPI documents
    AsyncAPI v3 support added in version 0.3.0 (Mar 2024)
  • Microcks
    Generate Kafka topics with mock data from AsyncAPI documents
    AsyncAPI v3 support added in version 1.9.0 (Mar 2024)

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Describing Kafka security in AsyncAPI

Wednesday, November 17th, 2021

As part of AsyncAPI Conference this week, I ran a session on how to describe Kafka security in AsyncAPI.

The aim of the session was to quickly show how to describe the security configuration of a Kafka cluster in an AsyncAPI document.

And, in reverse, if you’ve been given an AsyncAPI document, to show how to use that to configure a Kafka client or application to connect to the cluster, using the details in the AsyncAPI spec.

The recording and the slides I used are below.


youtu.be/CeGOLijUuQc


slides on Slideshare

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From bytes to objects: describing Kafka events

Saturday, October 23rd, 2021

The recording of the talk that Kate Stanley and I gave at Kafka Summit Americas is now available.

Events stored in Kafka are just bytes, this is one of the reasons Kafka is so flexible. But when developing a producer or consumer you want objects, not bytes. Documenting and defining events provides a common way to discuss and agree on an approach to using Kafka. It also informs developers how to consume events without needing access to the developers responsible for producing events.

In our talk, we introduced the most popular formats for documenting events that flow through Kafka, such as AsyncAPI, Avro, CloudEvents, JSON schemas, and Protobuf.

We discussed the differences between the approaches and how to decide on a documentation strategy. Alongside the formats, we also touched on the tooling available for the different approaches. Tools for testing and code generation can make a big difference to your day-to-day developer experience.

The talk was aimed at developers who maybe aren’t already documenting their Kafka events or who wanted to see other approaches.


watch the recording on the Kafka Summit website

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Describing Kafka security in AsyncAPI

Tuesday, June 29th, 2021

The new version of AsyncAPI, 2.1.0, was released today. One of the updates is that it lets you describe Kafka security mechanisms and protocols. In this post, I’ll show how you can do this, and how it relates to configuring a Kafka client.

Kafka config means AsyncAPI
sasl.mechanism security.protocol encryption? auth? server protocol security scheme type
unset PLAINTEXT no no kafka
PLAIN SASL_PLAINTEXT no yes, using SASL/PLAIN kafka plain
SCRAM-SHA-256 SASL_PLAINTEXT no yes, using SASL/SCRAM kafka scramSha256
SCRAM-SHA-512 SASL_PLAINTEXT no yes, using SASL/SCRAM kafka scramSha512
OAUTHBEARER SASL_PLAINTEXT no yes, using OAuth kafka oauth2
GSSAPI SASL_PLAINTEXT no yes, using GSSAPI kafka gssapi
unset SSL yes no kafka-secure
PLAIN SASL_SSL yes yes, using SASL/PLAIN kafka-secure plain
SCRAM-SHA-256 SASL_SSL yes yes, using SASL/SCRAM kafka-secure scramSha256
SCRAM-SHA-512 SASL_SSL yes yes, using SASL/SCRAM kafka-secure scramSha512
OAUTHBEARER SASL_SSL yes yes, using OAuth kafka-secure oauth2
GSSAPI SASL_SSL yes yes, using GSSAPI kafka-secure gssapi
unset SSL yes yes, using mutual TLS kafka-secure X509

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Event Endpoint Management

Sunday, June 27th, 2021

Last week, we released the latest version of Event Endpoint Management in IBM Cloud Pak for Integration 2021.2.1. It allows organisations to share and manage access to their Kafka topics. In this post, I want to share a run-through of how it all works.

I’ll start with a high level summary overview, then a walkthrough demo video, and finally share some links to related reading if you’d like more detail.

Overview


click for a larger version of the diagram – numbers in the diagram are described below

Kafka topic owner

This is someone who has a Kafka topic, and is running an application or system that is producing a stream of events to that topic.

They think this stream of events might be useful to other developers in their organisation, so they describe it (using AsyncAPI) and publish this to a catalog where it can be discovered and managed.

  1. creates a Kafka topic and an application that produces events to it
  2. describes and documents their Kafka topic, and the events that are being produced to it
  3. publishes the description of their Kafka topic
  4. pushes the Kafka cluster security info to the Event Gateway service so it can manage access to the topic for the topic owner

App developer

This is someone who is building an application that could benefit from a stream of events.

They are able to discover the event sources that have been shared in their organisation, and get access to them through a self-service Developer Portal.

  1. creates credentials for use in their application
  2. registers new application credentials
  3. updates the Event Gateway service with the new application credentials
  4. creates or configures an application with guidance from the Portal
  5. application connects to the Event Gateway service
  6. application connection routed securely to the Kafka brokers

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A Kafka Developer’s Guide to AsyncAPI

Tuesday, March 30th, 2021

How Kafka developers can use the AsyncAPI specification to describe how their applications are using Kafka topics.

In my post “Why should you document your Kafka topics?” last week, I wrote about the benefits of documenting your Kafka event sources, and mentioned a few of the problems that this can help with.

In this post, I want to show you how you can document the API for your Kafka event sources by creating AsyncAPI documents.

You don’t necessarily have to learn the AsyncAPI specification – tools such as the new Event Endpoint Management capability that I work on in Cloud Pak for Integration make it easy to document APIs with user-friendly forms that generate AsyncAPI documents for you. However, some developers will want to know more about what is happening under the covers, so here is an introduction.


youtu.be/Ni5tCY9r0TY

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AsyncAPI plugin for Node-RED

Sunday, March 21st, 2021

screenshot

I’ve been tinkering with a new AsyncAPI plugin for Node-RED as a side project over the last couple of weeks. Time to share what I’ve got working so far.

Node-RED is an open-source visual programming tool. You assemble flows on a canvas from a palette of nodes, that you customize and then wire together. That makes it ideal for quick prototyping.

There are nodes for different types of servers and devices, which makes it great for quick integration projects. This includes nodes for sending and receiving messages using protocols like Kafka and MQTT.

Normally, this means having to choosing a node from the palette, dragging it onto the canvas, clicking into it, and customizing it: filling in the connection details for the broker and topic you want to use.

The idea of this plugin is to do all of that for you, if you have an AsyncAPI specification for your topics.

The plugin can generate and customize the nodes for you, based on your spec – making rapid prototyping based on the spec even quicker.

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Describing Kafka with AsyncAPI

Friday, November 27th, 2020

In this post, I want to describe how to use AsyncAPI to document how you’re using Apache Kafka. There are already great AsyncAPI “Getting Started” guides, but it supports a variety of protocols, and I haven’t found an introduction written specifically from the perspective of a Kafka user.

I’ll start with a description of what AsyncAPI is.

“an open source initiative … goal is to make working with Event-Driven Architectures as easy as it is to work with REST APIs … from documentation to code generation, from discovery to event management”

asyncapi.com/docs

The most obvious initial aspect is that it is a way to document how you’re using Kafka topics, but the impact is broader than that: a consistent approach to documentation enables an ecosystem that includes things like automated code generation and discovery.

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