Shaking up Serverless Integration

The TriggerMesh team is proud to announce the Shaker project, an open-source AWS EventBridge alternative.

Background

To quote Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent 2022: “The world is event-driven”, and the way to handle the resulting uncertainty and asynchrony is to build event-driven software.

The idea is tantalising: write software that reacts in real time to events from a broad range of sources. Connect systems together by piping events between them. Trigger functions, services, automations and workflows. Solve business problems like infrastructure automation, threat detection, or SDLC code analysis. Add additional consumers without disrupting producers or other consumers. 

Until recently, operators and developers pursuing this were left with too much heavy lifting. The Apache Camels or Spring Integrations of the world can integrate many heterogeneous systems but at the cost of a steep learning curve and lots of glue code. The Kafkas and RabbitMQs of the world provide log or message-oriented data structures that scale, are fast, and are reliable but offload complexity, like filtering, to event consumers, and impose specific APIs, protocols, and SDKs which means you can’t just integrate anything.

This is why we’ve worked so hard to bring you the TriggerMesh Shaker project.

Announcing the Shaker project

Easy to run locally with no dependencies, with a short development inner loop. But still supports Kubernetes-native production deployments. And a built-in event registry. And of course replayability. And don’t forget the out-of-the-box event sources and targets. And with an easy way to transform events. And reliable delivery. Oh and open-source... These were the post-its on the wall at the end of our team offsite during the European Summer of 2022. 4 months have passed and we have delivered, as embodied by the new capabilities that come with Shaker:

• tmctl - the new TriggerMesh CLI that lets you build event flows in minutes on a laptop with Docker
• the new TriggerMesh Broker, either in-memory or backed by Redis for durability, completely self-contained, to reliably deliver events pub/sub-style
• built-in event registry - simplifies authoring of event flows by providing event metadata and schemas when and where you need it
• archive & replay - because sometimes real time is too realtime, replay past events to consumers that were late to the party

Shaker lets cloud-native developers create a unified eventing layer that is cloud-agnostic, open source, and caters to the entire development lifecycle from development to production.

Shaker is the codename that brings these pieces together, but don’t be surprised if you don’t see the name used on our website or product. We’ve focused our efforts on the core functionality, branding will be kept for desert, or digestif. 

So what makes this different? 

We were very excited to hear AWS announce EventBridge Pipes right before our launch. Vogels mentioned that this is one of AWS’s fastest evolving services and could be as powerful as UNIX pipes, but for the AWS ecosystem. 

TriggerMesh is designed to be cloud-agnostic, in fact it works brilliantly to connect different clouds as well as on-premises together (Azure to AWS example). It can run anywhere, because all the functionality is provided as containers that can be declaratively configured. tmctl makes it easy to run these containers on Docker, and the TriggerMesh CRDs and controllers will run them natively on any Kubernetes distribution. This means Shaker is easy to embed into existing projects such as internal developer platforms or commercial SaaS software, and can be operated in the same way as any other containerised workloads.

Being middleware-agnostic, Shaker is useful even if you already use messaging systems like Kafka, Rabbit, Kinesis or others: you can use it to create a unified way to filter, transform and deliver events to any consumer without needing to learn the underlying complexities of the middleware you’re using. Innovate more, ship faster, and create more realtime and resilient systems. 

Because a video is worth a thousand pictures, I’ll let the product speak for itself in this new video introduction of the Shaker project.

Are you ready to experience unified eventing? Get started today and create your first event flows in minutes.