How team sports explain Event-Driven Architecture
Have you experienced these moments when you hear a single sentence - and this sentence sums up things better than anything you could have come up with? That moment in respect to event-driven architecture took place on Tuesday for me.
I had been presenting to an American Fortune 500 customer on SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh and I had come up with this new slide wrapping up the advantages of event-driven architecture, comparing an EDA to team sports.
This comparison is in the end quite obvious since soccer players for example act loosely coupled while always knowing what is going on around them (situational awareness is the buzzword here) and ideally notifying each other in real time about their plans and actions.
In order to win, players need to act as a team. And in order to act as a team, they need situational awareness. You can replace soccer with your favourite team sport here - ice hockey, basketball, football, rugby. You pick. It's the same story. It is about situational awareness and teamwork. Talent wins games, teamwork wins championships.
Now transfer this to your SAP landscape - wouldn't it be great if your SAP S/4HANA system could inform your SAP Business Technology Platform and your SAP ECC system in real time of changes that are important? Of significant changes? Or even beyond your SAP landscape, if your SAP S/4HANA system would inform your Microsoft Teams of significant changes in real time.
My customer did this transfer in almost real time and worded it close to perfect:
I want my ERP to be a team player!
I simply love this sentence. It sums things up so well.
Let's make the next step: what do you need for that? In order to turn your ERP into a team player, you need an event-enabled backend, suitable event consumers and you need the appropriate infrastructure to transport and distribute your events: an event broker or event mesh.
So far SAP Event Mesh has been SAP's single offering in this space. Lately, beginning of August 2022 to be exact, we have added SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh to our portfolio. Advanced Event Mesh complements SAP Event Mesh for more demanding scenarios and offers a highly sophisticated feature set perfectly suited for the SAP Event-Driven Ecosystem and beyond.
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is a fully managed event streaming and management service that enables enterprise-wide and enterprise-grade event-driven architecture.
What is Advanced Event Mesh?
- Advanced Event Mesh is a distributed mesh of event brokers that can be deployed across environments, both in the cloud and on-premise
- It offers a full purpose set of eventing services covering all relevant use cases
- AEM supports event streaming, event management and event monitoring
- Brokers fully scale as required and come in T-shirt sizes to perfectly fit different needs
Advanced Event Mesh Cockpit
What features and benefits does AEM offer?
- AEM offers enterprise-grade performance, reliability, security and governance.
- It scales to very large use cases – and very means very very very in this case. On the other hand, you can start small, if needed, as well.
- SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh offers deployment options across different hyperscalers and in private cloud environments. All it takes is a Kubernetes environment.
- AEM can be configured to form a distributed mesh of event brokers. Events can flow across the mesh to be consumed where desired.
- It includes a sophisticated toolset to address tasks like cluster management, mesh management and monitoring/tracing.
- SAP Integration Suite integrates with SAP backends via different options
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh in ten short statements
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh
- is a general purpose, multi-site EDA platform and portal
- allows for SAP to SAP, SAP to Everything and Everything to Everything scenarios
- supports distributed networks of event brokers deployed in different clouds and on-premises
- can be deployed in your cloud of choice or in your on premises K8S
- provides sophisticated authentication and security features like Kerberos, OAuth or TLS
- offers fine-grained filtering options
- allows for real-time monitoring, capacity insights and distributed tracing
- provides support for all relevant protocols like JMS, REST, AMQP and MQTT, plus SMF.
- allows to start small and upgrade to bigger T-shirt sizes when your business grows
- provides an outstanding performance up to billions of events per day
Think Event Network!
You can think of Advanced Event Mesh as an event network. It is ideal for real-time high availability use cases: event distribution, event-driven integration, event-driven extensions of business applications, microservices and real time applications.
Advanced Event Mesh is a highly valuable addition to SAP's event-driven ecosystem and will allow you to target globally distributed, high load event-driven use cases complementing SAP Event Mesh for more demanding scenarios.
Additional Information on AEM and SAP's Event-Driven Ecosystem
For additional information on SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh and SAP's Event-Driven Ecosystem check out the following blogs:
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh vis-a-vis SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite
SAP's Event-Driven Ecosystem Revisited
There are two sessions at TechEd 2022 that can help you to get started with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh:
Experience Event-Driven Integrations Hands-On with SAP Integration Suite (IN261)
and
Discover Event-Driven Integration with SAP Integration Suite (IN103)