EventBridge and FC one-stop deep integration analysis

Why is there a need for one-stop deep integration?

First, let's take a look at what EventBridge is and what function computation is?

What is EventBridge?

Alibaba Cloud Event Bridge is a serverless event bus that supports the easy connection of user applications, third-party software as a service (SaaS) data, and Alibaba Cloud service data through events. It gathers rich events from cloud products and SaaS services;

From the perspective of the entire architecture, EventBridge connects event sources and event targets through event buses and event rules. Firstly, let's quickly popularize several core concepts involved in the EventBridge architecture:

• Events: Records of state changes;

Event source: The source of the event, the creator of the event, the system and service that generated the event, and the event source produces the event and publishes it to the event bus;

Event bus: responsible for receiving events from event sources; EventBridge supports two types of event buses:

Cloud Service Dedicated Event Bus: A built-in event bus that does not need to be created and cannot be modified, used to receive events from your Alibaba Cloud official event source.

Custom Event Bus: A standard storage state bus used to receive events from custom applications or stock message data. This bus is optional for general event driven applications.

Event rules: used to filter and transform events, helping to better deliver events;

Event target: The consumer of the event, responsible for handling specific events.

Through the above process, the entire process of event generation, event delivery, and event processing has been completed. Of course, events are not a new concept, and event driven architecture is also not a new concept. Events are ubiquitous in our systems, and event driven architecture is also constantly being discussed along with the evolution of the entire computer architecture. For EventBridge, the cloud native event standard CloudEvents is used to describe events; Bringing standardization of events, such standardization and the openness of event standards bring one of the most significant advantages: standardization of access, whether for event sources or event targets.

What is Function Computing (FC)?

Function computing is an event driven fully managed computing service. By using function calculations, you don't need to purchase and manage infrastructure such as servers, just write and upload code. Function calculation prepares computing resources for you to run tasks elastically and reliably, and provides functions such as log queries, performance monitoring, and alarms.

Based on the above description, everyone only needs to remember a few points:

Easy to use: Quickly go online, greatly improving business research and development efficiency;

• Server free operation and maintenance: saving operation and maintenance investment;

Pay as needed: calmly respond to sudden traffic scenarios;

Event driven: Cloud product interoperability and rapid linkage.

Why does function calculation require an EventBridge?

Function computing, with its lightweight, fast, and ability to interact with other cloud products in an event driven manner, has become the preferred choice for many customers to build business systems using event driven architectures. With the continuous increase in business and customer needs, customers have an increasing demand for connection between function computing and more cloud products and services. At the same time, for customers of other cloud products, I also hope to utilize the characteristics of serverless function calculation to help handle some system tasks and events.

1) Challenge of diversity of event sources

Event driven, as the core competitiveness of functional computing products, connecting functional computing with other cloud products, as well as user-defined applications, has become an urgent demand for functional computing ecosystem integration. However, system integration and ecological construction have never been an easy task. Before integrating with EventBridge, the function computing system had already been integrated with cloud products in typical user scenarios such as OSS and SLS, as well as with about a dozen other Alibaba Cloud products. Different systems have different event formats, different registration and notification mechanisms, and different upstream systems have different failure handling mechanisms; Some systems support synchronous invocation methods, while others support asynchronous invocation methods. The differences in invocation methods mainly depend on the product business scenarios faced by upstream systems when accessing function calculations. At that time, there was not much consideration given to expanding support for new product capabilities and business scenarios. With the integration of more cloud products, the investment in integration, the difficulty of integration, and the difficulty of underlying data management are becoming increasingly significant. Faced with the objective difficulty of integrating multiple event sources, function computing hopes to improve the integration efficiency with other cloud products.

2) Authorization complexity and security risks

In addition, function calculation aims to improve user experience and ensure that users are concerned about handling events; At the same time, we hope to ensure the complexity of system authorization when facing a large number of cloud products. When using event triggers, users need to understand the permission requirements for different product access function calculations, which poses great difficulties for customers to use function calculations. In order to accelerate product access, a large number of users often use the FullAcees permission, causing significant product security risks.

3) Difficult to precipitate universal capabilities

How to better deliver and consume events when facing different upstream event sources? How to handle event errors? How to choose the call method for function calculation? The feedback of backend error Backpressure capability, retry strategy, upstream system parameter settings, and limitations on the number of triggers in function calculation have become issues that function calculation event triggering must face. In order to better serve customers and provide reliable consumption processing capabilities, function computing hopes to have a unified access layer based on which to build consumption and flow control capabilities. By settling on such a standard level, while ensuring call flexibility, reliable service quality is provided.

Why does EventBridge also require function calculations?

As a standard event center, EventBridge aims to help customers utilize these events and link product capabilities through events. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to help customers quickly consume and handle these events through more convenient paths. The deep integration of EventBridge and function computing is precisely for the common goal of helping customers quickly build EDA based business systems and promote business success.

FC and EventBridge product integration function demonstration and scenario introduction

The specific event types supported by EventBridge basically include all official products of Alibaba Cloud. You can view the currently supported Alibaba Cloud official product event source types through the EventBridge official homepage.

EventBridge triggers and asynchronous integration

Click on the link below to jump to view:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1NY4y1e7fE/

The asynchronous link of function calculation supports direct delivery of processing results to MQ and EventBridge, and users can use EventBridge to deliver relevant results to SAAS services;

Click on the link below to jump to view:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1FY411j7yz/

Changes in bidirectional integration

1) More event triggered options for users

a. Function calculation supports 85+official Alibaba Cloud event sources;

b. Function calculation supports event triggering for the entire Alibaba Cloud message queue, including RocketMQ, RabbitMQ, MNS, etc;

2) More convenient event triggering experience for users

a. The data exchange between EventBridge and the function calculation console eliminates the need for users to jump back and forth between the function calculation console and the event bus console;

b. Users can quickly jump through trigger details and use the EventBridge event tracking ability to help users quickly troubleshoot problems;

Summary of official event source operation and maintenance scenarios

Event driven scenarios based on official event sources can be summarized and abstracted into four scenarios.

Scenario 1: The operation and maintenance requirements of a cloud product under a single account. Usually, customers hope to perform automated diagnostic and maintenance operations based on such an event, including events such as cloud server events ECS or container service mirror events, through such event monitoring.

Scenario 2: Actually, it is an extension based on Scenario 1. For events involving multiple cloud products, we hope to further analyze and do some fault handling.

Scenario 3: We observe that some large enterprises actually use Alibaba Cloud products through multiple accounts when using cloud products. In the case of multiple accounts and products, we hope to have a global and unified perspective on the usage of cloud resources in multiple accounts for practical analysis, while also making some adjustments to account quotas. In that case, the ability of EventBridge to deliver cross account events can be utilized, and then function calculations can be used for unified processing.

Scenario 4: This scenario is actually a cross domain event processing scenario for an account. Currently, EventBridge does not provide such a cross domain capability. In this case, the HTTP function capability provided by the function calculation can be used to automatically generate an HTTP endpoint, which can be consumed across domains through the HTTP event source of EventBridge.

Summary of Custom Event Source Scenarios

1) MNS queue custom event source triggering scenario: After the customer uploads a file in OSS, the ACK is expanded based on the file upload event. Currently, it is sent to MNS through OSS events, and then the MNS queue message is calculated through the EventBridge trigger function. In the function calculation, ECI resources are created according to certain logic; At the same time, the customer wishes to provide notification services through MNS; By utilizing the EventBridge subscription pattern and defining event rules, notification services and function calculations can share the same event subscription rule, greatly simplifying user solutions.

2) RabbitMQ queue custom event source triggering scenario: Given RabbitMQ's performance in stability and reliability, it is widely used in IOT scenarios. Customers usually choose to use RabbitMQ for end device data collection and storage. Considering the performance usage environment of embedded devices related to IOT, the data collected by end devices usually tends to be low-level raw data. In practical business aspects, Customers need to find a fast and efficient way to process data in RabbitMQ, and use the custom event bus provided by EventBridge to quickly process data in RabbitMQ using function calculations to achieve ETL purposes.

Next stage planning for deep integration of EventBridge and function computation

Advanced ETL processing for event filtering

Integrate function computation with EventBridge more closely, providing advanced ETL capabilities through function computation, enhancing the overall event filtering and transformation capabilities.

Provide richer event objectives

At present, there are relatively few event targets downstream of EventBridge. We hope to use the close integration of function computing and EventBridge, and utilize the agile development capabilities of function computing to build more diverse downstream event targets of EventBridge through large account mode and user self-sufficiency, helping to enrich the ecosystem of the entire event target.

Summary

This article introduces the one-stop deep integration analysis and integration scenarios of EventBridge and FC, aiming to help everyone better understand how to use EventBridge and FC's one-stop integration solution to quickly build cloud based business systems based on event driven (EDA) architecture when facing rich events.

If you want to learn more about scenario applications, you can follow the "Alibaba Cloud EventBridge Series Open Class". The complete course has been launched heavily and is continuously popular! This series of live classes includes a total of 5 topics, which will take you to gain a deeper understanding of the core functions and applications of the Alibaba Cloud EventBridge event bus.