Introduction

As part of your event-driven architecture solution, Event Endpoint Management provides the capability to describe and catalog your Kafka topics as event sources, and to share the details of the topics with application developers within the organization. Application developers can discover the event source and configure their applications to subscribe to the stream of events, providing self-service access to the message content from the event stream.

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. The Event Gateway is independent of your Kafka clusters, making access control to topics possible without requiring any changes to your Kafka cluster configuration.

Event Endpoint Management can be deployed as a standalone installation, or it can be deployed as part of Cloud Pak For Integration. You can also integrate Event Endpoint Management with IBM API Connect by importing the AsyncAPI document that defines the Kafka event source. This integration provides the option to use events as part of your overall API management solution.

The following diagram provides an overview of Event Endpoint Management.

1. The Kafka administrator describes the Kafka topic, which is the event source. They can select a topic from an existing Kafka cluster or specify a new cluster, after which the topics on that cluster can be made available by adding and describing them.
2. The Kafka administrator publishes the Kafka topic. The topic is then available in the catalog for application developers to discover and use as an event source.
3. In the catalog, the application developer can browse the available Kafka topics that represent event sources and discover information about the kind of event data available, based on which they can decide which one to use in their applications.
4. The application developer selects the topic that provides the source of events required for their application and subscribes to the topic, generating the required credentials for their application to consume from the topic. The developers can manage their subscriptions through the Event Endpoint Management UI.
5. The application developer connects their application to the event source using the snippets and credentials provided, and this sets up their application to consume from the selected topic through the Event Gateway.
6. The application connects to the Event Gateway for access to the topic’s event stream.
7. The Event Gateway routes traffic securely to and from the Kafka cluster that holds the relevant topic content, providing the content to the application as required.