TriggerMesh announced Shaker, an open-source AWS EventBridge alternative. Shaker captures, transforms, and delivers events from many out-of-the-box and custom event sources in a unified manner. To find out more, VMblog reached out to TriggerMesh CEO and co-founder, Sebastien Goasguen.
VMblog: Congratulations on the Shaker announcement! Can you explain to our readers what it is?
Sebastien Goasguen: Shaker is an open-source AWS EventBridge (serverless event bus) alternative that provides a unified eventing experience, short development feedback loop, and native Kubernetes deployment. It lets you capture events from many sources, transform and route them in a unified way, and reliably deliver them to many different targets.
VMblog: Why is Shaker important for the market right now?
Goasguen: DevOps teams, platform engineers, and software vendors want to build event-driven applications but for most teams, coding it themselves from scratch isn’t viable as it requires too much time and resources, detracting them from delivering their core value. Events are often heterogeneous and need to be transformed, which requires additional tools. Developers need an easy, low-friction way to consume events, and asking everyone in the company to learn to master something like Kafka can be prohibitive. Shaker from TriggerMesh captures, transforms, and delivers events from many out-of-the-box and custom event sources in a unified manner. It is a simple open source eventing solution that will appeal to most DevOps, SREs, and platform engineers looking to boost their event-driven journey and build integration like the newly announced AWS EventBridge Pipes service.
VMblog: Why not just use AWS EventBridge?
Goasguen: AWS keeps on innovating with EventBridge, making events a first class citizen in cloud application development. Google and Azure are lagging behind to offer their customers similar capabilities. With this announcement, TriggerMesh offers any cloud-native developers and their organizations the ability to develop similar event-driven applications and catch up with the AWS eventing development mindset. Shaker can be run on-prem and provides event sources and targets outside the AWS ecosystem.
VMblog: We’re hearing lots of talk about events and event-driven applications and architecture – why all the buzz?
Goasguen: There are more events available to developers than ever before. All cloud vendors are event-enabling their services, which is greatly increasing the number of useful events made available to developers today. Generally speaking, event-driven integration is gaining momentum, where API-based integration has been the main attraction the last decade or two.
Look at how AWS went all-in on APIs in 2002, and in 2019 released EventBridge as the need for events grew and just last week released App Composer and EventBridge pipes to further support their customers in building serverless applications.
VMblog: Why not stick with API-based integration?
Goasguen: It is too tightly coupled. The rate of innovation is so quick that there isn’t always the time and resources needed to build a service-oriented architecture that would anyway introduce coupling between different parts of the organization. EDA decouples everything and allows an async mindset.
VMblog: Ok, let’s dive deeper on Shaker. What are some of its benefits?
Goasguen: There are a number of important benefits with Shaker:
- Unified eventing: TriggerMesh provides a unified way to work with events (using the CloudEvents specification) and provides access to the most popular event sources and targets in AWS, Azure and GCP out of the box.
- Easy transformations: TriggerMesh includes a transformation engine based on a simple DSL, but also offers code-based transformations when more flexibility is needed.
- Maintainable over time: make changes to TriggerMesh simply by updating configuration, no deep dives into code and no complex build cycle. Easily onboard new people. Implement GitOps-style workflows.
- Agility, scalability, reliability: As TriggerMesh decouples producers and consumers and handles reliable delivery between them, it is easy to add and remove consumers and producers, and scale them independently. The Kubernetes-native deployment option leverages the great operational capabilities of Kubernetes.
- Easily embedded into existing platforms or products: Because TriggerMesh can be added to any existing K8s cluster or simply run with Docker, it is flexible and open enough to be embedded and integrated with existing software. The Apache 2.0 license also makes that less risky.
VMblog: What are next steps if someone wants to know more about TriggerMesh and Shaker?
Goasguen: Give TriggerMesh a try or join us on the community Slack Channel at https://join.slack.com/t/triggermesh-community/shared_invite/zt-1kngevosm-MY7kqn9h6bT08hWh8PeltA.
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