Read about the key concepts and terms used in Event Endpoint Management.
Topic
A Kafka Topic, which contains a set of related events.
Event source
Topics are presented as event sources in the catalog. Kafka administrators describe topics as event sources, and this information is published to the catalog. In the catalog, application developers can discover and browse the available event sources and decide which ones they want to use in their applications. They can then configure their applications to subscribe to the selected topic’s stream of events, providing self-service access to the message content from the event stream.
Catalog
The catalog lists all available topics that represent event sources. Kafka administrators can check what topics are published and made available to others in the organization. Application developers in your organization can use the catalog to browse the available topics, and to view more information about each of them, including a description, tags, sample messages, schema details if used, and so on, enabling self-service access to the stream of events represented by the topics.
Cluster
Kafka runs as a cluster of one or more servers (Kafka brokers). The load is balanced across the cluster by distributing it amongst the servers.
Subscription
Application developers configure their applications to subscribe to the stream of events, providing self-service access to the message content from the event stream, and generating the required credentials for their application to consume from the topic. Kafka administrators can manage subscriptions that are created for their topics in the Event Endpoint Management Topic Detail page.
Event Gateway
Access to the event sources are managed by the Event Gateway. The Event Gateway handles the incoming requests from applications to consume from a topic’s stream of events, routing traffic securely between the Kafka cluster and the application.
The Event Gateway is independent of your Kafka clusters, making access control to topics possible without requiring any changes to your Kafka cluster configuration.
Gateway group
A gateway group is a group of gateway instances that can be logically grouped and scaled together. When deploying a gateway, you can define gateway groups by name, and any gateway instances with the same group name are considered a member of that group.
The following are examples of gateway groupings:
- Gateways that are deployed to manage Kafka traffic to designated Kafka clusters.
- Gateways that are colocated within the same geography.
- Gateways that represent different Kafka topics and streams at different stages of adoptable maturity, such as development, test, or production.
When gateways start, they join their defined gateway group and pull any configuration that is specified for that group. The configuration for a gateway group is determined when publishing an event source, where you can select which gateway group the event source must be accessible through. By publishing an event source to a gateway group, you can restrict which gateways have access to an event source without specifying the gateway instances directly. Gateway instances can be added or removed from a gateway group at any time, providing flexibility as the use of event sources matures.
Note: A gateway instance can only be a member of one gateway group.
Important: When removing a gateway deployment, work with subscribed users to ensure their clients are configured to work with another member of the same gateway group, so they can continue to consume your event source.
Message
The unit of data in Kafka. Each message is represented as a record, which comprises two parts: key and value. The key is commonly used for data about the message and the value is the body of the message. Message is also sometimes referred to as event data and record.
To learn more about key concepts, see the Apache Kafka documentation.